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MEMOIUAL OF CHARLES SUMNER. 



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IlEMOTVI-R IIV J. It. 



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MEMORIAL 



CHARLES SUMNER. 



F ROM THE 



CITY OF BOSTON 



" Greater than the Diviiiily that doth heilge a King, is the Divinity that eneomiiasses the 
righteous man and the righteous people." — SunuteT's Oration be/ore the City authoritus, July 
4, lS4o. 



y^ftUS^^ 




BOSTON : 
PRINTED BY ORDER OF THE CITY COUNCIL. 



MDCCCLXXIV. 






R o c K \v p; L I, ft c n u n c n i i, i, , 



CONTENTS 



Action of the Citv Government 



Meeting in Fanecil Hall 



The Funeral 



Memorial Services 



Eulogy by Carl Sciiurz 



ACTION OF THE CITY GOVERNMENT. 



ACTION OF THE CITY GOVERNMENT. 



Chaeles Sujiner died suddenly at the NatioDal Capital ou 
"Wednesday, the eleventh of March, 1874, at ten minutes before 
tkree o'clock, P. il. The sad intelligence was innnediateh' communi- 
cated to the ilayor of Boston, who ordered the flags ou the pub- 
lic buildings to be displayed at half-mast, and called a special 
meeting of the two branches of the City Council for the following 
day at twelve o'clock, uoon. 

At the meeting of the Board of Aldermen a message from the 
Mayor was read, as follows : — 

Executive Department, City Hall, ) 
Boston, March 12, 1874. J 

To the Honorable the City Council : — 

Gentlemen, — The mournful duty devolves ujion me 
of calling you together to receive the official announce- 
ment of the death of Chai'les Sumner, who, during a 
period of twenty-three yeai's, has been the honored and 
trusted representative of our people in the highest coun- 
cils of the nation. 

It is fitting that the city of Boston should do honor to 
one of her citizens, who has always devoted his great 
abilities to the advancement of fi'eedom and the establish- 
ment of just and equal laws. Born in Boston in 1811, a 



10 JIEMOrJAL OF CHAKLES SUMNER. 

graduate of the Latin School, and the recipient of a 
Franklin Medal in 182G, he has ever retained his citizen- 
ship here, and has at all times responded, with noble 
alacrity, to the demands which have been made upon him 
in that capacity. 

Althongh he held the i)Osition of a party leader in the 
most eventful period of our country's history, no breath 
of suspicion has ever tainted the purity of his motives; 
and, had his life been spared l)ut a short time longer, I 
believe there would have been a universal recognition 
among his own countrymen, as there was among the most 
intelligent in foreign counti'ies, of his wise and fai-seeing 
statesmanship. 

I trust you will take such action as will propei-ly 
express our sense of the great loss sustained by this city 
in the death of its most eminent citizen. 

SAMUEL C. COBB, Ma>jnr. 

Aldcriuan Steisp.ins said : — 

Mr. Mayor: It is proper that the city which has the 
honor to he the birthplace and home of Charles Sumner 
should meet in its corporate capacity and officially express 
the sorrow which burdens all hearts in this hour of 
national mourning, and pay homage to our illustrious 
dead. 

The feeling of sadness pervading our city is like that 
of a personal bereavement, for which words fail to give 
adequate expression. The life we commemorate has been 
a Golden Deed, and the best thought and culture of all 
nations will pronounce eulogies in honor of our great 



ACTIOJiT OP THE CITY GOVERNMEKT. 11 

citizen. The American people will guard his fame as 
their highest examj^le of purity and integrity in public 
life. His errors will be written upon the sand, while his 
virtues will be engraven upon enduring monuments. His 
memory will be cherished for that love of country and 
humanity which actuated his whole life ; and the people 
he labored so earnestly to ransom will teach their chil- 
dren's children to call him blessed forevermore. 

Mr. Mayor, as an expression of the feeling of the 
City Council, I desire to submit the following resolu- 
tions : — 

Resolved, That the City Council receives with profound 
sorrow the intelligence of the death of Charles Sumner, 
and deeply mourns the loss of the great Senator whose 
illustrious career has reflected such honor and renown 
upon the city of his birth and home. 

Resolved, That the public services rendered by Mr. 
Sumner in the Senate of the United States throughout a 
period of more than twenty-three years, and especially 
his wase counsels upon international questions and his 
untiring devotion to the rights of man, have laid a lasting 
debt of gratitude upon the American people ; and we now 
gratefully recall the pride with which he ever regarded 
his native city, and his constant fidelity to the imijortant 
and varied interests of Boston. 

Resolved, That the life of this great statesman affords 
a striking example of the fearless and conscientious dis- 
charge of every public trust. In him we saw a man 
whose constant incentive was a high sense of public duty; 
whose heart ever beat in response to the claims of the 
humble and oppressed; who was the firm friend of the 



12 MEMORIAL OF CHARLES SUMNER. 

soldiers of the republic, whose loyalty and devotion saved 
the union of the States; who, though respectful to public 
opinion, was still al)Ove it, and independent of it; who 
never used his influence or his oflice to aggrandize him- 
self, or to secure unworthy ends; and, above all, one upon 
whose pure and spotless private character no breath of 
suspicion ever i-ested. 

Resolved, That His Honor the Mayor be requested to 
call a meeting of the citizens in Faneuil Hall, at an early 
day, to take such notice of this event as may 1)e ajjpi'opri- 
ate in view of the irreparable loss which the people of 
Massachusetts, and particularly of Boston, have sustained. 

Resolved, That a joint special committee of the City 
Council be appointed, to act in co-operation with His 
Honor the Mayor and the State and national authoi'ities, 
in making arrangements for the funei'al ceremonies, and 
for such other tokens of respect to the deceased, as are 
due to the purity of his character, and the greatness of 
his public services. 

Akierman Cutter said : — 

Mr. Mayor : Again has an impressive warning come 
to teach iis that in the midst of life we are in death. The 
lessons of His providence, severe as they may be, often 
become merciful dispensations, like that which is now 
spreading sorrow through the land, and which is remind- 
ing us that we have higher duties to fulfil, and graver i"e- 
sponsibilities to encounter, than those that meet us here. 
Another great man has fallen in our land, ripe in years 
and in honors, but never dearer to the Amei'ican people 



ACTIOK or THE CITY GOVERNMENT. 13 

than when called from the theatre of his services and re- 
nown to that final bar where the lofty and the lowly must 
all meet at last. 

It is almost a quarter of a century since he took his 
seat in the Senate of our country. Since then he has be- 
longed to his country, and has taken a part, and a prom- 
inent part, both in peace and war, in all the great ques- 
tions affecting her interest and her honor; and though it 
has been my fortune often to differ from him, yet I believe 
he was as honest a man as ever participated in the councils 
of a nation. During all the vicissitudes of a long and 
eventful life he ever showed an anxiety to relieve the 
afflicted and down-trodden. 

Frank and fearless in the expression of his opinions and 
in the performance of his duties, with rare powers of elo- 
quence, which never failed to rivet the attention of his 
auditory, and Avhich always commanded admiration even 
when they did not carry conviction; prompt in decision, 
and firm in action; with a vigorous intellect trained in 
the contests of a stirring life and strengthened by en- 
larged experience and observation, and great purity of 
purpose, — these were the elements of his power and suc- 
cess, and we dwell upon them with mournful gratification 
now that we shall soon follow hira to the cold and silent 
tomb where we shall leave him alone to the mercies of his 
God and ours. 

Alderman Prescott said : — 

Mr. Mayor : I rise to sustain these resolutions; but I 
never before felt so keenly how inadequate are woi'ds to 



14 MEMOKIAL OF CIIAKLES SUMNER. 

exiiress the feelings which seem to pervade the whole 
community. Charles Sumner is dead. Boston justly 
claims him as her honored son. Born here sixty-three 
years ago, when Boston was but a town, he fitted himself for 
college at our Boston Latin School, received there a medal 
inscribed as the gift of Benjamin Franklin, and finished 
his collegiate education, in 1830, at our neighboring uni- 
versity. The next twenty yeai's of his life, till he entered 
the United States Senate in 1851, were spent at home and 
abi'oad, mainly in intellectual pursuits, which he loved so 
well that when he entered the national service he was one 
of the ripest scholars in the country. 

Here his history becomes a part of the history of the 
country. The biographer who at some future day may 
write of the service of Mr. Sumner during the last quarter 
century of his life, will write little else than the history of 
his country during that time. 

I need not recapitulate, Mr. Mayor, the services of Mr. 
Sumner to his city, to his State, to his country, to the 
cause of struggling humanity throughout the world. 
Though he belongs to us as a city, in a larger sense the 
whole world will claim him. The absolute purity and in- 
tegrity of his charactei" ai'e above all suspicion. He was in- 
dependent even of his own party (which he loved so well) 
and a man whose views were constantly in advance of the 
times. Though strong in his support of the Govei-nment 
in its struggle with rebellion, he was among the first to offer 
the hand of friendship when peace was declared. How- 
ever men may differ in i-egard to the practiculiility of his 
views, which caused his State to stain its records with an 
implied censure of him, is there a man living who will 



ACTION OF THE CITY GOVEENTVTElSrT. 15 

dare to say that Charles Sumner was not honest in those 
sentiments r* Thank God, that before the silver cord was 
loosed or the golden bowl was broken, he had the satis- 
faction of knowing that the old Commonwealth he had 
served so faithfully sent to him, in the person of one of 
the race he had done so much to elevate from degradation 
and slavery, a resolution blotting out the ungrateful words. 
But, Mr. Mayor, this is not the place nor the occasion to 
l^ronounce a eulogy upon Mr. Sumner. Soon his manly 
form will be borne back to his native city, and all classes, 
from the highest to the lowest, will drop heartfelt tears 
over his bier. 

" Let us weci) in onr darkness, but weep not for him ; 
Not for him who, departing, leaves millions in tears ; 
Not for him who has died full of honor and years ; 
Not for him who ascended fame's ladder so high. 
From the I'oiuid at the top he has stepped to the sky." 

AldcrDian Hareis said : — 

Mr. Chairman: I feel unwilling to suffer this occasion 
to pass without briefly adding my tribute to the departed 
statesman. Identified with a party differing in politics 
from Mr. Sumner, I must in all frankness bear witness to 
his honesty and incorruptibility. His life illustrates the 
success of an earnest and a laborious man. His strong 
physical powers and clear vision impelled him onward 
and upward; he could not remain contented to occupy 
any uncertain position. jSTo timidity characterized his 
actions; he folloAved to the end his convictions of what he 
believed to be right. He was like a standard bearer, ready 



16 MEMOKTAL OF CIIAELES SLTMNER. 

to lead, and his judgment and freedom of speech caused 
him to be ever surrounded with friends. They shared in 
his reputation and his honor. We lament his death, and 
Ave would recognize in this dispensation our dei)endence 
upon oiu- Creator for all that we are permitted to receive 
and enjoy. 

Aklt'riuau Toweu said : — 

Mk. CiiAiitMAX: I feel it my duty to say a word on 
this occasion. I heartily concur with all that has been 
said or is to be said in eulogy of the great statesman now 
deceased ; and although belonging to the great party that 
has in times past differed so widely with him on some of 
the great questions of government, I feel that I but utter 
the universal sentiment of that })ai'ty Avhen I say that he 
always commanded their respect for his luiliinching zeal 
and undoubted honesty. And, as I said before, I heartily 
conciu' in all that has been said and all that is proposed to 
be done out of respect to the memory of the deceased. 

Aldcriiiau ( 'r.AKK said: — 

Me. Ciiaieman; I rise merely to say that I heartily 
concur in the sentiments of respect to the memory of the 
deceased. It is not often that a city is called upon to 
take action in regai'd to the death of a statesman so emi- 
nent for his sei'vices to his native city, to his State, and to 
his country. The reputation of Mr. Sumner extends be- 
yond the limits of our own country; he is almost as well 
known in Europe as he is here; and the intelligence of 



ACTION OF THE CITY GOVEKIfMENT. 17 

his death will be received with almost as much sorrow in 
Europe as it is in the city of Boston. 

There is no doubt that if there ever was a pure man in 
political life, that man was Charles Sumner. During the 
many years in which he was engaged in the public service 
there never was any question of his earnestness of purpose 
and his honesty of action. In him every one who has 
ever felt the yoke of oppression has lost a friend. It is 
deeply to be regretted that he has been taken away in 
the midst of his useful labors. But I trust, sir, that his 
example will be felt by those who are now engaged in 
administering the affairs of the country, and that it will 
help to call out others who will work, as he worked, for 
the best interests of the city, the State and the nation. 



The question was then taken upon the adoption of the 
resolutions, and they were unanimously agi-eed to, the 
members rising in their places. 

Alderman Stebbins presented the following order, 
which was unanimously passed : — 

Ordered, That the joint special committee to be ap- 
pointed under the resolutions in relation to the death of 
Charles Sumner consist of the Chairman of this Board and 
Aldermen — — , with such as the Common Council may 
join, and that his Honor the Mayor be requested to act as 
chairman of the committee; the expenses incurred by said 
committee to be charged to the appropriation for inci- 
dentals. 

The Mayor appointed Aldermen Stebbins, Cutter and 

3 



18 MEMOIUAL or CHARLES SUJVINEK. ' 

Preseott as members of the committee. The Board tlien 
adjourned. 



At the meeting of the Coiniiiou Couneil, the message from the 
Mayor was read by the President, EuwAitD O. Siiei'Akd, wh(j then 
adth'essed the members as follows : — 

Gentlemen of the Cojijion Couxcil : By the 
message of his Honor the Mayor, we are called together 
as representatives of the chief city of the Commonwealth, 
to provide such last tributes of honor and respect as are 
due from this metropolis to the remains of Charles Sum- 
ner. His public career as Senator from Massachusetts for 
ucai'ly a quarter of a century j his public acts in behalf of 
freedom and the highest interests of his country ; his ster- 
ling integrity and his matchless honor, are familiar to you 
all. It is fitting that this city of his birth, thi s first city 
of the State he has represented so many years, should 
pay to his memory, now that he has gone from us, its high- 
est triljute of honor and respect. 

The resolntions adopted ))y the Boardof Aldermen wei'c then read, 
and tiic (juestion lieiug upon the eoneurrenee of tlic Council, Mr. 
Dean of Ward 12, said: — 

Mr. Pkesident: Althougli within the short time which 
has elapsed since the reception of the news of the sad 
event which has called us together it has been impossible 
to make j)reparation for an ade([uate expression of the sen- 
timent which involuntarily rises on this occasion, it does 



ACTION OF THE CITY GOVERNMENT. 19 

seem fitting and proper that an event of this great impor- 
tance should not pass entirely unnoticed by those who 
have differed from him in times which are passed. Charles 
Sumner has been before the people of the United States 
— and of the world in fact — for a generation. And we 
cannot "contemplate his death without having our minds 
revert back to the time when the contest in which he bore 
so important a part, and which was of such national impor- 
tance that all of the citizens of the United States were 
called to express their interest on the one side or the other 
of it, — I say we cannot help having our minds revert back 
to the past, to the time when, in our boyhood, that contest 
had its origin. I remember very well how, in the early 
years of my life, I sympathized so sincerely with the cause 
which he so ardently espoused. And even now I remem- 
ber very well the peroration of an oration, — not delivered 
by Mr. Sumner, • — which was one of those pieces of oratory 
which had an influence in inflaming the minds and draw- 
ing the attention of all to the great topic which was the 
principal theme of his oratory. I remember that the ora- 
tor to whom I allude, after si^eaking of the wrongs of 
Africa, conjured up the genius of Africa, and caused it to 
address the genius of America; and, although it is so many 
years since, the language is still vivid in my mind. He 
described Africa as pointing her hand towards America, 
and then slowly raising it towards heaven, and exclaim- 
ing : — 

" 'I will meet thee there! I will meet thee there! Not 
at Philippi, in night and battle agony, but at the bar of 
God, under the blaze of the judgment fires, just when the 
highest hills of heaven are reddening with the united blaze 



20 MIOMOHTAT. OF CHARLES SUMNER. 

of Afncva and Anu'rica. I will meet thee there, to ask for 
my sons and my daugliters, for my kings and my prin(tes, 
for my national renown and for my eternal salvation.' 
Slowly, like one stiffening to death, the accusing spectre 
has vanished. It is for us, my beloved countrymen, to lay 
tliis terrible spectre forever, that it accuse us not in the 
inom(!nt when the world's gray fathers and the latest born 
shall be witnesses of the disgrace, and the hollowness of 
our boast of freedom shall provoke the jeers of the 
woi'ld." 

I say, Ml'. President, that in my school-boy days I sym- 
pathized heartily Avith the sentiment of those words, and 
that sympathy is not abolished yet. It is true, tliat, sub- 
S(!quently, as 1 arrived at the years of manhood, I was com- 
pelled to assume another conviction of my duty, which is 
best expressed in the opinion of the late Chief- Justice 
Shaw, in a case thai, came before the Supreme Court for 
decision : — 

So long as the States remained sovereign they could 
assert their rights in regard to fugitive slaves by wai- or 
treaty, and, therefore, before renouncing and surrendering 
such sovereignty, some substitute, in the nature of a treaty 
or compact, must necessarily be devised and agreed to. 
The clause of the Constitution seems to have been in char- 
acter precisely such a treaty. It was a solemn compact, 
entered into by the delegates of States then sovereign and 
independent, and free to remain so, on great deliberation, 
and on the highest considerations of justice and policy and 
I'cciprocal benefit, and in order to secure the peace and 
prosperity of all the States. It carries with it, therefore, 
all the sanction whichcan belong to it, either as an inter- 



ACTION or THE CITY GOVER]!^MENT. 21 

national or a social compact, made by parties invested 
with full powers to deliberate and act; or as a fundamental 
law, agreed on as a basis of a government, irrepealable, and 
to be changed only by the power that made it, in the form 
prescribed by it." 

These two sentiments, if they may be descril^ed as such, 
seem to have represented the feelings and convictions on 
one side and the other; and these two sentiments were in 
contest until finally the climax was reached. The war 
came; it is ended; and peace again reigns. At first it was 
like a cloud of the size of a man's hand. It spread itself 
broadcast over the entire land. It burst, and war and dev- 
astation followed. Peace came at length; and, as we 
looked around, we found the cause of the quarrel blotted 
out forever. In that blotting out I rejoice; and I have no 
doubt the entire country some day will, as indeed now 
does the entire !North, look with pride and satisfaction 
ujjon this one great and happy result of an otherwise un- 
profitable, internecine war. No longer is such oratory as 
I first alluded to needed. We are still a united people; 
the cause of the division and contest is obliterated forever, 
and it only remains now for us to bring about that reign 
of peace and concord which, at the last, was Charles Sum- 
ner's chief desire and work. He entered into it with such 
zeal that it provoked even the condemnation of the Legis- 
lature of our own Commonwealth. Subsequent reflection 
satisfied it that he was in the right, and it hastened, ere he 
died, to carry to him the assurance that it was with him in 
his mission of peace. Let it be our great object now to 
reap the full benefit of the past, and do whatever we can 
for the purpose of so cementing peace and concord 



22 MEMORIAL OF ClIAKLES SUJMNER. 

throughout the entire nation, that it will make us forever 
remain united and indivisible. The event gives I'ise to 
another reflection. However we may difler in opinion, 
whichever side of any question we may take, — we shall do 
our duty if we follow our sincere convictions. Although 
I may differ in ojiinion from others, they have not the 
right to go according to my judgment, any more than I 
have to act according to theirs, if we each believe we are 
right. On this defei'ence to the opinion of the majority 
rest the fundamental principles of American government. 
I thei'efore, Mr. President, with great cheerfulness, favor 
these resolutions, and, in company with the most ardent 
admirer, with the closest follower of Charles Sumner, I 
shall take pride in dropping a tear upon his grave, and in 
recoi'ding my vote to perpetuate a proper tribute to his 
memory. I cannot, Mr.President, sit down without calling 
attention to the recent visit of the committee of the City 
Council on the post-ofliec extension to Washington. 
Among the most pleasant duties of that committee — for it 
was a duty as well as a pleasure — was a call of the entire 
delegation upon Senator Sumner j and we cannot but. 
remember the great pleasure it seemed to give him to have 
a delegation from the city of Boston — his native city — 
visit him. And with what eagerness he proceeded to bring- 
forth his treasures; how he called our attention to the 
Bible which John Bunyan had in j^rison; to Pope's Essay 
on Man, with the poet's corrections in his own handwrit- 
ing; how he brought forth an album amicorum, contain- 
ing autographs of dukes, princes, and many eminent 
men; and how we neglected all others, to look upon the 
writing and signature of John Milton; and how untiring 



ACTION OF THE CITY GOVERNMENT. 23 

he was in testifying liis appi'eciation of tlie pleasure 
derived from our visit. I remember that, as I called atten- 
tion to the copy of the reports that he presented, with his 
own autograph, to Judge Story, in these words: "Hon. 
Joseph Story, from his affectionate friend and grateful 
pupil, Charles Sumner, March 30th, 1836," which is now on 
my OAvn table, his mind seemed to go back to the past 
time, a look of sadness came over his face, and I could see 
that he was buried in revery as he was contemplating his 
past life, when he was enthusiastically engaged in the prac- 
tice of his profession here, in his native city. There is 
another circumstance, Mr. President. When speaking of 
the appropriation for the post-office, and of some one of 
the congressional delegation from Massachusetts who, he 
thought, was a little inclined to hesitate, he said, " I do 
not; I am for Boston first, and for the appropriation bill 
afterAvards." He was eminently a son of Boston, Mr. 
President; and as he went for Boston first, so we will go 
for Charles Sumner now and last. 



Mr. Boardman, of Ward 14, said : — 

Mr. President: I can add but little to what has 
already been said by the member from Ward 12 in sup- 
port of the resolutions which have been oftered. I most 
cheerfully corroborate his statement of the interview and 
the genial entertainment that Charles Sumner gave us 
when we were in Washington at the time to which he has 
referred. In my own case — and I presume in that of 
other members of the delegation — my preconceived 



24 MEMOKIAL OF CIIAELES SUMNER. 

opinion of Mr. Snmner was somewhat modified. While 
we all had admitted the remarkable attainments of Senator 
Sumner, and liis unswerving devotion to the freedom of 
all classes, an idea has to a certain extent prevailed that 
he was dictatorial in his manners ; that, possibly, his dis- 
position savored of arrogance. That was the feeling I 
had in some degree. I had leai'ued to admire him fron^ 
afar. But, certainly, no manner could have been more 
cordial than he showed — no greater warmth of welcome 
could have been extended than that by him to us. He 
seemed to take a personal interest in our visit there, and I 
wish to add something to the allusion made by the gentle- 
man from Ward 12. When the Cjuestion was asked 
whether he could support the post-ofRce appropriation — 
especially as his voice had been the first raised at the com- 
mencement of the session for retrenchment — he replied, 
citing an Italian maxim, which you will pardon me for not 
repeating, but which he kindly translated for us, to this 
effect, that " a citizen is a Venetian before he is a Chris- 
tian ; " adding, " I am a Bostonian before I am a Sena- 
tor ; " creating the impression that we could rely entirely 
upon him, first and always. And, during the banquet 
given by Hon. Henry L. Pierce, he proposed to find out 
how the delegation in Congress stood upon the question, 
so anxious was he to see how the interests of Boston were 
represented. I do not think it necessary to allude to 
these incidents to convince us all of the fidelity of Charles 
Sumner to his native city ; but it is pleasant to be 
reminded of them ; to treasure them with memories of 
him hereafter. And I might also add that it was the 
opinion of all of us who then saw him, that his strength was 



ACTION OF THE CITY GOVEE>rMENT. 25 

unabated, that we could hope to retain his vahiable ser- 
vices in the same position in the country and State for 
many years. I remember ]Mr. Somerby, who was there, 
thought he had passed the critical period of his life, and 
that we could assume that ten or fifteen years more of 
active sei'vice would be given by him to his country. It 
is not fitting now for us to enter upon an analysis of the 
character of the distinguished Senator, even if time per- 
mitted. He blended in a rare degree an exhaustive 
scholarship with profound integrity. It is true that in the 
most intense jxartisan strife, whenever his course was such 
as to provoke the warmest opposition from his opponents, 
his character for spotless purity was never attacked. !No 
one could go to the Senate of the United States who was 
acquainted with his blstory — and who is not? — and see 
him there, constantly in his seat, constantly giving all his 
attention, so far as possible, to the duties of his office, 
without pronouncing him the " noblest Roman of them 
all." In combined scholarship and character he had no 
equal nor second in that distinguished body. In my 
opinion he was foitunate in his death. Rarely has it hap- 
pened to aii}^ public man who has engaged, as he was en- 
gaged, in a great work for the elevation of mankind, to 
enter into the fruit of his labors as he did. It might fairly 
be claimed that his life had been rounded when emancipa- 
tion was secured foi- the slave. He not only lived to see 
freedom conferred upon the slave, but he lived long 
enough to secure for them also full and equal recognition 
in nearly every i-espect before the law ; and, Mr. Presi- 
dent, I think that in his death his influence will not be less 
felt than if he had lived to carry out by his voice and pen 



26 MKMORFAL OF CHARLES SUMNER. 

this same givat work ; that something- of tlie asperity 
which was nourished to a certain degree will be banished, 
and that, though dead, he will yet speak in that important 
work. As the great Roman orator, after he had defended 
the i'epid)lic against the machinations of Catiline, said that 
he " had done enough to secure his own renown, but tlie 
oidy question was whether he had done enough for the 
rei)ul)lic," so has Charles iSumner done enough for his own 
glory for all time to come. No man has ever lived in this 
country who has so enshrined himself in the memories of 
an entire race of men, who has made himself more memo- 
rable among the lovers of the human race. Never can the 
immoi'tal words of Pei'icles, in his eulogy over the graves 
of Athenian soldiers, that " for illustrious men the whole 
earth is a mausoleum,"' be more fitly applied than to him. 
For certainly his acts, his aspirations, his philanthropy 
and his devotion to humanity are as comprehensive as the 
whole world itself. 

Mr. .SiiAAV, of Ward '), i^aid : — 

Mi;. Presidkxt: It is a sad and mournful occasion, this, 
that brings us together to-day. The nation mourns. To- 
day humanity moui'us the world over. The national em- 
blem to-day floats upon the breezes of iniiversal lamenta- 
tion fi'om continent to continent with extraordinary 
signiiicance. Tlie electric wires are freighted with sorrow, 
as tluy convey the sad intelligence of our great calamity 
to the nations t)f the earth, and millions of })eople arc 
bowed down in grief. God, in his infinite wisdom, has 
lilottt'd out the l)riglitest star of the American firmament. 



ACTION OF Tin-: CITY GOVKRXJIEXT. Zi 

In the fulness of manhood, after the accomplishment of 
the noble purposes to which he has devoted a lifetime, 
Charles Sumner has gone to his final reward. The rest 
he so much coveted has Ijeen granted him. His wearied 
body has returned to its mother earth — his soul to the 
bosom of its Creator. Requiescat in 2>ace! But he has 
left behind him a noble heritage. His name and his fiime 
are the undying memorials which humanity will cherish, 
through all generations to come, till time shall be no more. 
Possessing the capacity to master, and mastering the great 
questions of the day, — but above all and more than all, 
possessing honesty of purpose and unquestioned spotless 
integrity, persistent and unfaltering devotion to the great 
principles of freedom and human rights which charactei- 
ized and imderlaid all his actions, — his name had be- 
come endeared to the hearts of the civilized world, and 
mourning and sorrow at the sad event are not confined 
to this continent alone. "When stricken down and felled 
to earth by the minions of slavery, uncomplainingly he bore 
upon his person the effects of the brutal assault which 
finall}^ brought him to the grave ; but within his soul faith 
and hope, and confidence in the righteousness of the cause 
which he had espoused sustained him through long years 
of bodily suffering. 

" His was the better fortitude of patience 
And heroic martyrdom." 

It was my fortune to know Mr. Sumner more intimately 
than at any other time, during the earlier years of the 
Kebellion, and, while holding official relations with the 
Government, to have had much of his advice and counsel j 



28 MEMOIilAL or CHARLES SUMNER. 

and I should l)e doing' great injustice to my own sense of 
duty did I not add a few words of gratitude to God that I 
have enjoyed his contidenee, and add something- to the great 
vohmic of well-merited praise which to-day is ascending- 
to heaven. Mr. Pi-esident, it is needless for me to sa}^ that 
the resolutions meet in my bosom a hearty approval. 

The question was tbcu taken, and the Common Coimeil oon- 
cmrecl imanimously in the adoption of the resolutions, the mem- 
bers rising in their places. 

The order appointing a conanittee to arrange for the funeral of 
Charles Sunmcr was read twiet' and passed l)y a unanimous vote. 

The President appointed Messrs. Weston of Ward 1, Loring of 
Ward 12, Cawleyof Ward 2, Page of AVard V, and Kent of Ward 
21, the committee on the part of the Coulmon Council. 

On motion of Mr. Dean of Ward 12, the President of the Com- 
ni(ni Council was added to the eomniittee. 

On motion of ]\Ir. Barnes of Ward 11, the Council tiien 
adjourned. 



MEETING m FANEUIL HALL. 



MEETING IN FANEUIL HALL. 



Ill response to an invitation from His Honor tlie ]\Iavor, a nuni- 
l)er of the leading eitizens of Eoston met in the Mayor's office on 
Thursday, the twelfth of INIarch, at half-past ten o'elock A. M., 
for the purpose of making arrangeincnts for a meeting of the 
citizens in Faueuil Hall, "to afford an op[)ortuiutv for a public 
expression of the great loss sustained in the death of Charles 
Sumner." 

The following committees were appointed : — 

On organization: — Frederic AV. Lincoln, Charles G. Greene, 
Charles Levi Woodbury, Ezra Farnsworth, Otis Korcross, AVil- 
liani W. Clapp, Francis Dane. 

On resolutions : — Richard H.Dana, Jr., Alexander H. Rice, 
William Gaston, Richard Frofhingham, Oliver Wendell Holmes-, 
Joshna B. Smith, P. A. Collins. 

Li accordance with the request of the City Cormcil and the 
citizens, the INLayor called a meeting in Faneuil Hall on Saturday, 
the fourteenth of IMarch, at twelve o'clock, noon. Under the direc- 
tion of the City Committee, the interior of the hall was appropri- 
ately decorated with the insignia of mourning. As soon as the 
doors were open, the building was filled with persons in every 
condition of life, anxious to testify by their presence and their 
voice to the sorrow which pervaded the community\ 

At the horn- designated for the meeting, Hon. Frederic W. Lin- 

colu came forward upon the platform, and stated that he was 

31 



32 



MEMORIAL OF CHARLES SUMNER. 



authorizccl l)y the conimittec having charge of the organization, 
to prcseiit the following list of officers : — 

Pvei<idrnt, 
Samuel C. Conn, Mayor. 



Vice-Prefii(lcn(ii, 



AVen.lcIl riiillips, 
C'liarh's Francis Adams, 
Ivichanl II. Dana, Jr., 
'\\'il]iaui (iray, 
Benjamin K. Curtis, 
George Tyler liigelow, 
George S. Ililiard, 
Wm. Lloyd Garrison, 
Wm. Perkins, 
Francis AV. Bird, 
Nathaniel Adams, 
Francis E. Parker, 
Edwin P. AVhipple, 
Tiionias Russell, 
Nathaniel Thayer, 
Edward L. Pierce, 
AVm. Claflin, 
Thomas C. Amory, 
Marshall P. AVilder, 
Edward O. Shepard, 
James L. Little, 
Moses Kimball, 
E. R. ISIndge, 
George C. Richardson, 
Ilai-vey Jewell, 
Robert Morris, 



Thomas Leavitt, 
Henry Lee, 
Edward Atkinson, 
Joseph W. Batch, 
S. N. Stockwell, 
Oliver Ditson, 
A\'. AV. Greenougli, 
J. AV. Candler, 
Joseph F. Paul, 
D. N. Haskell, 
George Dennie, 
George II. Monroe, 
Lewis Rice, 
Ciiarlos R. Codman, 
F. AV. Palfrey, 
S. D. Crane, 
Peter Harvey, 
George S. Hale, 
H. P. Kidder, 
Horatio Harris, 
Artluir AV. Austin, 
Delano A. Goddard, 
Josiah Quincy, 
Alpheus Hardy, 
Joseph M. AVightman, 
Henry D. Hyde, 



MEETING IN PANEUIL HALL. 



33 



He my D. Hyde, 
A. D. "Williams, 
Charles W. Slack, 
Walbridge A. Field, 
George Lewis, 
"William Parkmau, 
J. I. Bowditch, 
Henry Smith, 
Dexter N. Richards, 
George B. Nichols, 
Joseph W. Tucker, 
George L. Euffiii, 
L. Mies Staudish, 
Patrick Douahoc, 
Charles Stauwood, 
L. Foster Morse, 
R. "W. Hooper, 
J. "W. Bcmis, 
John Pickering, 
Robert C. "VVinthrop, 
Horace Gray, 
Edward Lawi'cncc, 
H. H. Coohdge, 
Sidney Bartlett, 
Samuel H. "VValley, 
John M. Forbes, 
John T. Clark, 
N. J. Bradlee, 
Peleg W. Chandler, 
J. Huntington "Wolcott, 
Martin Brinuner, 
F. A. Osborn, 
James Lawrence, 
F. V. Balch, 

6 



"Wm. Amory, 

C. A. Richards, 

Edwin M. Chamberlain, 

Thomas GafEeld, 

Avery Plumcr, 

Edward S. Tobey, 

Albert Bowker, 

M. F. Dickinson, Jr., 

Franklin Haven, 

Edward W. Kinsley, 

John Cummings, 

James M. Beebe, 

Charles H. Allen, 
Amos A. Lawrence, 
Charles E. Pindell, 
S. B. Schlesingcr, 
Otis Rich, 
Calvin Torrey, 
William "Wells Brown, 
M. P. Kennard, 
Reuben Crooke, 
R. M. Pulsifer, 
James W. Bliss, 
Harvey D. Parker, 
Albert J. "Wright, 
George "William Bond, 
James Guild, 
Moses H. Day, 
H. G. Crowell, 
John E. Fitzgerald, 
H. A. Whitney, 
Curtis Guild, 
Nathaniel Greene, 
Weston Lewis, 



34 



MEMORIAL OF CHAKLES SUMNEIJ. 



N. B. Shurtlcii; 
A. W. Board, 
H. A. Whitney-, 
Henry L. Hallctt, 
Samuel Little, 
Uriel Crocker, 

D. D. Kclley, 
Serciio D. Nickerson, 

E. H. Clarke, 
George B. Fauuce, 
Samuel Atherton, 



W. W. Warren, 

Samuel M. Quiucy, 

Jonas Fiteh, 

J. el. Smith, 

George A. Simmons, 

C. A. Phelps, 

G. W. Wilder, 

G. Washington Warren, 

James Dana, 

H. Winthrop Sargent. 



Moorfield Story, 
Franklin W. Smith, 



Secretaries. 



C. C. Smith, 

C. A. B. Shepard. 



The list was adopted by the meeting; and the Mayor then 
asked (he Rev. Sanuiel K. Lothrop, D.I)., to offer a prayer. 

T>n. LoTimor said : — 



I have l)een requested by His Honor the Mayor, before 
ofteriiig prayer, to read the following brief sentence from 
the opening passage of Mi-. Sumner's oration, or eulogy, on 
Lincoln. It is his own handwriting. I read from his 
original manuscript: — • 

" In the universe of God there are no aecidents. From the fall 
of a sparrow to the fall of an empire or the sweep of a planet, all is 
according to Divine Providence, where laws are everlasting. It 
was no accident which gave to liis country the patriot we uow 
iionor. It was no accident which snatched this patriot so suddenly 
aud so cruelly from his sublime duties. The Lord giveth, and the 
Lord taketh away ; blessed be the name of the Lord." 



MEETIN^G rv FANEUIL HALL. 35 

Almighty God, thou who livest and reignest King 
of kings and Lord of lords; thou who livest while 
mortals die, in devout submission and gratitude we hum- 
bly invoke thy blessing and the comforts of thy spirit as 
we gather here this morning in solemn recognition of that 
inscrutable ordering of thy providence which knoweth no 
accident, by which one of our most distinguished fellow- 
citizens and national Senators has been suddenly called 
from his high ofRce, from the scene of his earthly fame 
and glory and usefulness, to the higher scenes and grander 
gloi'ies of the eternal world. We thank thee, O God, for 
his life. We thank thee that thou didst raise him up, 
endow him with large talents, enrich his mind with varied 
learning, give him a commanding presence and eloquence, 
and send him forth to be the champion of freedom, to 
proclaim first that liberty was national and slavery 
sectional in the republic; and then by energy and per- 
severance, through toils, sacrifices, sufferings and perils, 
to bear an important part in the high councils of the 
nation, and in that conflict which ended in breaking the 
fetters of the slave and proclaiming freedom universal and 
entire throughout the land. We thank thee that his life 
was spared till his great work was done, and that the 
closing days of that life were made sweet and pleasant 
by the direct assurance from the highest authorities of his 
native State that he was still held in its perfect trust and 
honor. And now, O God, that thou hast called the State 
and the nation to mourning and sorrow by his death, we 
pray that that death, as the life that preceded it, may be 
sanctified to all. We pray, especially, that his example 
may impress upon all rulers and people the inestimable 



36 MEMORIAL or CHARLES SUMNER. 

value of that energy in duty, that firm devotion to princi- 
ple, that incori'uptible integiity, purity and honor, Ijoth in 
])ublic station and in pi'ivate life, that can alone preserve 
the peace, the progress, the prosperity and the glory of 
this great nation; and may all that is said and done here 
this morning, and elsewhere, tend to quicken in our hearts 
that faith and those principles that shall make us better 
men, better citizens, and better Christians; and this we 
ask to the glory of thy holy name, through Christ Jesus 
our Lord. Amen. 

The Mayou then addressed the meeting as folluws : — 

Fellow-Citizexs : The lifeless form of Charles 
Sumner is now on its way from the national capital to 
Massachusetts, in the honorable and afiectionate custody 
of his peers in office. 

Charles Sumner, the statesman and patriot, the scholar, 
orator, philanthropist, — a great and good man, — is dead. 
The whole civilized world takes note of the solemn event. 
The whole country, in its great cities, its scattered vil- 
lages, its roadside farmhouses, and its lowliest cabins, 
pauses, reflects, and mourns. But Boston occupies tlie 
place of chief mourner. His character and fame are the 
property of the whole nation; but in his personal inter- 
ests aiul aifections he was, and is, ours. His father was 
an honored magistrate of Boston. 

In these squares and alleys of ours, the boy, destined 
to such eminence, pursued his childish games. He was 
educated in our schools, and in the university on our 
bordei's. In his youth and early manhood, he sat at the 



MEETING EST FANEUIL HALL. 37 

feet of our Quincj, and Story, and Shaw, and Adams, and 
Webster, and Evei-ett, and Channing. Here the future 
Senator received the influences from without, and kindled 
the aspirations within, that in due time resulted in that 
brilliant career, that noble and unspotted life, that unwea- 
ried, undivided and pre-eminent service for truth and 
right, for freedom and humanity. 

Twenty-three years ago he went forth from among us 
to take his part in the great arena of jjublic life — in the 
early prime of manhood, and without experience in affairs, 
yet a stalwart man, and full of intellectual vigor and 
generous enthusiasm. But yesterday he was a power in 
the land, standing conspicuous among the foremost in 
influence and in the public respect and confidence — one 
to whose slightest word a nation listened with deference. 
To-day his right arm has fallen, cold and motionless; his 
tongue is stilled, his intelligence is quenched to our 
mortal apprehension; his great soul gives no sign, and 
his crumbling body is being borne back to us, to be laid 
to its rest by our hands within the shadow of our city's 
domes and towers, and of the home he loved so well, llis 
grave will be another added to our shrines of the illus- 
trious dead, which we and our children and our children's 
children, and citizens from western prairies and southei'ii 
savannas, and travellers from foreign lands, will visit 
with reverend steps, to meditate on departed greatness 
and worth. 

We do well, fellow-citizens — we could not do less or 
otherwise — to gather to-day in this our historic hall. We 
come to mingle our sympathies and tears under the pres- 
siu-e of a great affliction. We come to renew our appre- 



38 BIEMORIAL OF CHARLES SUMXEU. 

elation of an illustrious character and life, and rekindle 
our aspirations for the best and loftiest things. We come 
to give thanks to the Giver of all Good foi- this bright 
and pure light permitted to shine upon us so long, and to 
bow in submission to the decree that has now withdrawn 
it. We come to pay our tribute — not the last tribute, 
but the first — to the sacred memory of one of our best 
and <>-reatest men. The solenni gi'ief of this hour for the 
death of Charles Sumner reveals to us how much — how 
much more even than Ave knew — we did in our hearts 
honor and revere him while living. 

Resolutions will now be presented for your acceptance, 
which, I trust, will be found to embody, as far as mere 
language can, the sentiments with which the sad occasion 
has filled the minds of all of us, and of the nndtitudes 
around whom these walls could not contain. I shall then 
ask your silent and reverent attention to such remarks as 
may be oflercd by men, who, as the personal friends or the 
life-long associates, or the intellectual peers, of the de- 
ceased, are qualified to speak of his character and services, 
and to ia>press upon us the lesson of the hour. 

lion. EiCHAni) H. Dana, Jr., said : — 

Mu. Mayor : On such a day as this, when this Cradle 
of Liberty is draped as the chamber of death, in the pres- 
ence of these tearful eyes and swelling hearts, my words 
may well be few. Happy indeed would be the man who 
could add anything to the expression of the scene. I am 
aware, sir, that I owe the honor and privilege of my ])ost 
this morning to the fact that you and some others remem- 



MEETING I5f FAKEUIL HALL. 39 

ber that I have been a friend of Mr. Sumner from my boy- 
hood to the last. He was indeed a friend — I will not say 
fliithful and just, but partial and kind to me. And to-day 
it is most fitting that I should restrict myself to a little 
testimony of what I know and remember, which is not 
known by the rising generation. I can bear witness that 
in the university his life was intensely studious ; that at 
the age of twenty-three he had secured the reputation of 
a scholar and a thinker, and the respect and friendship of 
eminent men in jurisprudence and letters. When he went 
to Europe, at the age of twenty-six, he bore credentials 
from the first men of America to the first men of Europe, 
for they knew that he would justify all that they could say 
of him. And his great success in all parts of the Old 
World was owing not merely to his genial social qualities, 
his affectionate heart and his varied accomplishments, but 
there are many who know that in London and Paris and 
Vienna and Rome, his days and nights were as laborious 
and studious as within the walls of Harvard University. 
He commanded the respect and glad attention of the most 
eminent men, holding the most responsible positions in 
Europe. They foresaw in him the great publicist and 
statesman to which time developed him. I knew him in 
vai'ious relations, social, professional and literary, but I 
pass them all by for the consideration of the part he took 
in organizing the great party of freedom in 1848. He 
had been indiflerent to ordinary politics until the anti- 
slavery cause, passing out of the region of mere moral 
effort, shaped itself into a movement of practical politics. 
It was at his chambers in Court street that that small band 
of men Avas in the habit of gathering prcj^aratory to the 



40 MEMORIAL OF CHARLES SUMXER. 

IJuftalo convention of 1818. And I would pause a mo- 
ment, sir, to i)ay my tribute of respect, in which I know 
that you, Mr. Vice-President of the United States, will 
heartily join, to the disinterestedness, the courage, the 
fidelity of the men who began that undertaking in those 
dark days when it seemed all but hopeless, and promised 
little else than hiboi- and sacrifice. I recall the faces and 
voices — some of them have passed away — of Mr. Adams, 
Henry Wilson, Chai'les Alien of Worcester, Stephen C. 
Phillips of Salem, Samuel Hoar of Concord, and his son. 
Dr. Palfrey of Cambridge, John A. Andrew, Horace 
Mann — but I will not try to complete the roll. Our 
thoughts to-day are directed to one of its youngest, who 
became the most eminent of all. He has the right to have 
said of him what Burke said of Charles James Fox in 
tribute to his cflbrts to protect the suftering East Indians 
from the oppression of the East India Company : "He 
put to the hazard his ease, his interests, his friendship, 
even his darling popularity, for the benefit of a race of men 
he had never seen, and who could not even give him 
thanks. He hurt those who were able to requite a bene- 
fit or punish an injury. He well knew the snares that 
might be spread about his feet by political intrigue, per- 
sonal animosity, and, jiossibly, by popular delusion. This 
is the path that all heroes have trod before him. He was 
traduced and maligned for his sup]iosed motives. He 
well knew that as in the Roman triumphal processions, so 
in public service, obloquy is an essential ingredient in the 
composition of all true glory." Social ostracism had 
fallen upon him, in a measui'e which this generation can 
hardly credit. Although it wounded his sensibilities in 



MEETESTG IN FANEUIL HAI.L. 41 

many directions, it never affected his action. And I 
know, as an intimate friend, that it did not affect his feel- 
ings towards individnals. He did not deal with men as 
units, as the chemist deals with the ocean, by its drops. 
He dealt with them by classes and races. He raised up 
allies or opponents, friends or enemies, by masses, in obe- 
dience to those great laws of opinion and passion with 
which he dealt. 

Mr. Mayor, I testify to the manner in which he bore 
himself diu'ing the most severe ti'ial of self-respect and 
dignity which I ever knew a man subjected to. I refer 
to that pei'iod when his first election to the Senate was 
pending before the Legislature. He was tried by the ad- 
vice of anxious and zealous friends, and by the hostility, 
reproaches and sneers of the enemies of his cause. Every- 
thing seemed at stake upon that issue. He was urged to 
see this man or that man, or allow such and such jiei'sons 
to be brought to him. It was i-epresented to him that if 
he would meet more freely with those who had the decis- 
ion in their power, and not hold himself aloof ; if he would 
say, by pen or tongue, this or that word, the result might 
be secured. But we who stood about him know that he 
was firm and immovable as that rock in the harbor of 
Plymouth, surrounded by the dashiugs of a December sea. 
IsTeither by what he did, or did not do, or say or did not 
say, did he contribute anything to the result. " Let them 
say, or think," said he, " that I am reserved, or haughty, 
or impracticable. I know it is self-respect. I know that 
my usefulness in the post depends upon the manner in 
which I attain it." And when, at length, the hour of tri- 
umph came, he did not allow himself to regard it as a 



42 MEMORIAL or CIIAKLES SUMNER. 

personal triuinph over any individuals or small body of 
men, whatever might have been his relations to them. 
And I well remember — it is as fresh to me as if it were 
yesterday — going into his chamber on the day after the 
election, and noticing an expression of sadness on his 
noble countenance. The newspapers of the day were 
strewn upon the floor, and he said, w"ith a sigh : '''Ah, 
when I see tliat cannon are firing and bells ringing in 
New i^ngland, and on the Western Reserve of Ohio, I am 
inexpressibly sad at the thought that I cannot, I know I 
cannot, meet the public expectations in this cause." 

But, Mr. Mayor — O my friends before me ! — could he 
have foreseen then the scenes of the last days ! — could he 
have foreseen that, in three and twenty years, the news of 
his death would have been met by the tears and sobs of 
four millions of an enfranchised race; that his seat in the 
Senate, from which he should once be driven l)y violence, 
would be draped in mourning by the hands of his col- 
leagues, and adorned with the freshest flowei's of the 
southern soil! — could he liave laiown that the news of 
this event was to be spi-ead in a few hours through the 
civilized world, and resjjonded to by tributes of honoi" and 
2)raisc from more than one continent and Irom the isk's of 
the sea; that business and thought would be arrested 
thoughout this republic, and held as by a S2iell, for days; 
that Hags would be worn at lialf-mast and bells tolled in 
Charleston, South Carolina; that Inde2iendence Hall, in 
Philadelphia, would resjjectfull}' solicit the honor of holding 
for a few hours his i-emains on their funeral march; that 
the great emporium of I^ew York could not l)e satisfied 
in the eaf>-erness of its demand to do him honor: antl that 



MEETESTG IN FANEUIL HALL. 43 

here, in his ovm Commonwealth and city, the entire com- 
mnnity should nnite, past differences forgotten and 
buried, in most tender tributes — ah, sir, — ah! my friends 
— 7iis friends ! — if he could have foreseen this, or the one 
hundredth j)art of this, he would not have feared that he 
could not meet the public expectation! 

I have desired, sir, to contribute my testimony to some 
of these events now belong-ing to the past. It is not best 
for me to attempt more. If I should ever think of analyz- 
ing his C|ualities and powers, it would not be here and now. 
One of the resolutions says truly, that he was faithful to 
the material interests and the welfare of the State and city. 
This is true; but it is also true that he always made them 
secondary, as they are, to the great moral questions on 
which our national life depends. In the words of a poet, 
never put in print, but which fell upon my ear in this hall, 
a few weeks ago, whose presence we acknowledge with 
gratitude to-day, and whom the friends of Charles Sumner 
now will, more than ever, love and revere [E. W. Emer- 
son, who was on the platform] — 

" Of what avail, 
The plough and sail, 
Or land or life, 
K freedom tail ! " 

The contemplation of a great character is always elevat- 
ing and ennobling. His moral and intellectual nature was 
constructed upon a large scale; his mind belonged to the 
comprehensive order; but it was that mysterious power of 
wall, that more subtle moral energy and human sympathy, 
on whose seat in the human frame no physiologist has been 



44 MEMORIAL OF CIIAHLES SUMNER. 

able to put h'lfi iiugxT, that insured to those powers their 
highest aud fullest action. But, Mr. Mayor, I must restrain 
myself from attempting to enter upon that field. I cannot 
take my seat, however, without thanking you for g"iving 
me this opportunity to add a little testimony, to express a 
few thoughts and feelings, not on his account but on my 
own. And I will content myself with hoping that the res- 
olutions, which I have the honor to present, will not fall 
entirely short of expressing, in some measiu'e, what this 
assembly desires to place upon the record of this solemn 
season. 

i\lK. Dana then road the following 

RESOLUTIONS. 

It having pleased the Almighty Maker of men and All- 
wise Disposer of events to bring to a close the life and 
lal)ors on earth of Charles Sumner, the citizens of his na- 
tive town, assembled in this hall sacred to the memoi'ies 
of great and good men, desiring to express our sorrow for 
this bereavement, and our gratitude for his life and servi- 
ces, do unanimously agree upon these resolutions : — 

Resolved, The benefactions of his public service have 
penetrated to the depths of our civilization, touched the 
springs of oiu* national life, and will be felt for genei-ations 
in the I'enewed and purified organization of the republic. 

Resolved, To this great result, affecting humanity itself 
everywhere and in all ages, he contributed not only by 
what he has said and done and suffered in the chamber of 
the Senate, but by stirring and tireless appeals, for thirty 



MEETCSTG IN FANEUIL HALL. 45 

years, to the conscience and lieai't, the magnanhnity and 
sensibilities of the whole people of this hxnd. 

Resolved, We recall with special satisfaction his inex- 
haustible moral energy, his marvellous intellectual vigor, 
his untiring industry, his varied attainments, the purity of 
his private character, the loftiness of his public purposes, 
the scholarlj' charm of his life and couversation, the dig- 
nity of his bearing, his indomitable resolution, a capacity 
of enthusiasm for right and indignation against wrong, 
and a civil courage which neither feared nor courted the 
hate or favor of men. 

Resolved, While we unite with othei- citizens of our 
Commonwealth and of the republic in expressions of 
sori'ow for snch a loss, and satisfaction and pride in such 
a life and service, we have a nearer claim and more special 
interest as citizens of Boston, the place of his birth and 
home, in whose institutions he was educated, and to whose 
peculiar care his mortal i-emains are to be confided. We 
acknowledge the interest he always took in onr institu- 
tions of education, charity, art, science, and letters, and the 
aid he rendered to them by his pen and tongue, his counsels 
and labors. We recognize that his name will add lustre 
to our history. And we desire especially to record our 
testimony to the fact that while his thoughts wei'e dii-ected, 
and his powers devoted, to the enfranchisement of a race, 
the reorganization of our national system, the adjustment 
of our relations with liberty and law, and to our inter- 
course with foreign powers, he never tailed, as a public 
agent, in the Senate, to give full attention and conscien- 
tious labor to the material intei-ests of our city, and to 
anything that concerned its dignity or welfare. 



46 MEMORIAL OF CIIAIJLES SUMNEK. 

Resolved, We heartily approve the action of the State 
and the city in pi'epai-iiig for the remains of Charles Sum- 
ner a pnblic funeral, in which all om' ])eople may iniite, 
with the honors it has been the wont of our city and com- 
munity to pay to its illustrious dead. 

Itesolved, There should be erected a permanent memo- 
rial of Charles Sumner, such as becomes a community not 
unmindful of its duty to its great and good citizens, and 
iitted to keep his character and services before the minds 
of future generations. We recommend that this memo- 
rial be one to which all, howevei- poor, and of whatever 
age, race or party, may make contributions. 

liesolced, To carry out the purpose of the preceding 
resolve, the Mayoi" is requested to appoint a committee of 
fifty citizens. 

The Mayor then introduced Mu. Joshua B. Smith, who said : — 

Mk. Mayok and CxKNTLEJiEisr : I would not appear here 
befoi'e you to-day to say a word — for I do not feel able 
to do it — but for one reason. I can only say Massachu- 
setts has lost a Senator, the United States has lost a 
statesman, the world has lost a philanthropist, I have lost 
a friend. 

I shook Ml-. Sumner's hand for the last time last Sun- 
day evening, at half-past eight o'clock. He bade me say 
to the people of Massachusetts, through their Legislature, 
this : " I thank them for removing that stain from me. 
[Applause.] I thaidi those that voted for me, and I tell 
those that voted against me that I forgive them all, for I 
know, if they knew my heart, they would not have done it. 



IVIEETING EST FAI^fEUIL HALL. 47 

I knew Massachusetts was brave, and I wanted her to 
show to the world that she was magnanimous too." That 
is my reason for speaking, and that alone. I have felt 
that the greatest tribute I could pay to him for his kind- 
ness to me was simply to drop a tear to his memory ; 
but your honored Mayor was kind enough to bring me 
forth to show my friends the fruits of his labors. I can 
go back to the time when I sat under the eagle in this 
hall, and when I saw some one stand on this platform ; 
and I did wish, when I heard certain expressions, that I 
could sink. I can go back to my boyhood, when I have 
seen other boys in their sports and plays, and I would 
walk off in the woods and say, " O God ! why was I 
born ?" 

I can remember fort}'-five years ago, on a Christmas 
day, passing through the orchard and seeing a silk-worm 
hanging to the leaf of a tree. I took it home and hung it 
in the room. I put it where it was warm, and it was 
hatched out befoi-e the atmosphere was ready to receive 
it. I lifted the window and it flew off, but had to return, 
as it could not stand the atmosphere. And just so was I 
hatched out by the eloquence of Charles Sumner, and 
turned loose in the atmosphere of public opinion, where I 
had to suffer immensely. I could only feel at home and 
feel well when I tui'ued back into his presence, and his 
arms were always open to receive me. [Applause.] 

And now, Mr. Mayor, our ship in which he has com- 
manded is still adrift. We ai'e standing out now in the 
open sea, with a great storm, and in behalf of those five 
millions of people of the United States, I beg of you to 
give us a good man to take hold where he let go. [Ap- 



48 MEMOKIAL OF CIIAKLES SUMNER. 

l^lanse.] "We are not educated up to that point. We 
cannot speak for onrselves. We nnist depend npon 
otliers. We stand to-day like so many little children, 
when their parents have passed away. We can weep, 
but we don't understand it ; we can weep, but we must 
beg of you to give us a man who will still lead us for- 
ward until we shall have accomplished all those desigus 
for which he oflered his life. 

Mr. Mayoi-, I thank you for this opportunity. I have 
appeared in Faneuii Hall many times. If I was able — if 
I had his tongue — if I could pay him for what he has done ! 
but I cannot ; such as I have I give him. [Applanse.] 
Mr. Mayor, I second the resolutions. 

Hon. Alexander H. Rice was then iutrodiiced, and spoke as 
follows : — 

Fellow-Citizens: Amid the associations of this 
place and of this honr, surronnded by these mourning em- 
blems and oppressed l^y this stupendous sorrow, my lips 
seek no utterance and my heart clings to silence and con- 
templation. A great life has indeed closed. An illus- 
trous career has ended. For a moment the voice of dis- 
cord is hushed, and a stricken people bow before the 
majesty of Heaven to take the measure of the nation's 
loss, and to forecast the future with its hopes and fears, its 
joys and sorrows. It is a thne not alone for mourning, but 
for courage and resolution also. Our streaming eyes fol- 
low anxiously the retreating forms of departed statesmen 
— of Lincoln, of Andrew, of Sumner, and their illustrious 
compeers in council and in Avar; and it behooves us to take 



MEETING IK FANeUIL HALL. 49 

up manfully the duty which they have left us, mindful that 
in the fierceness of battle, when the ranks are thinning, 
victory often hangs upon the new-born valor of the remain- 
ing few. Charles Sumner has departed. It is too soon 
for his eidogy; too soon for his history. Our minds are 
fidl of his image; our hearts burn too hotly with the par- 
tial veneration and love. Memory throws back to us fas- 
chiating glimpses of his person and his character, and a 
critical estimate of his worth is just now obscured by a 
suifusion of tears. We see, as it were, his commanding 
figure in our streets. AVe catch anew his genial smile of 
I'ecoguition, and we hear the marvellous voice which now 
thrilled the Senate with denunciation, argument or appeal, 
and again fell in the accents of sweetness and pathos in the 
circle of his companions and friends. In character he was 
a moral hero. In learning and experience he was a model 
statesman — the great senator. Always the friend of the 
oppressed and the defenceless, the advocate of liberty for 
his own sake, and the tireless champion of human rights 
for all men, his forensic eflbrts had the boldness and fer- 
vency of Chatham combined with the classic purity and 
elegance of Burke, whom in countenance he so strongly 
resembled. Through a long career the advocate of an im- 
popular cause, at times the object of vituperation and even 
of personal violence, no man ever assailed the sincerity of 
his motives, the blamelessness of his life, or his stainless 
fidelity. The taint of imfaithfulness never touched him. 
Suspicion found no lodgment upon the guileless simplicity 
of his deeds. He despised duplicity and revolted at every- 
thing that was dishonest. The good name of his native 
State was as dear to him as his own reputation; and in the 



50 MEMOiaAL OF CHATtLES SUMNER. 

(liscliarge of liis public trusts, his patriotism was tlie sure 
guardian of the national renown. No opportunity for 
personal aggrandizement, no solicitation of private gain, 
could swerve him from his sense of duty or from his 
conviction of the requirements of the public welfare. 
In the contemplation of such a character how grand 
is justice, how radiant is truth, how lovable is 
fidelity, how hiestimable is personal honor! To these 
there is no death. Mr. Sumner, to a remarkable degree, 
exhibited his life, as it were, in duplicate; for while en- 
gaged in the activities of his career he seemed an historic 
personage. There was a breadth to his statesmanship 
which transcended the measure of his generation, while 
his learning sujjported it with examples from the past and 
pointed out the way of safety in the future. Even his 
con\'ersation often bore the stately dignity of a message to 
posterity. With comprehensive sagacity he discerned the 
philosophy of government ini)assing events, and often an- 
ticipated his peers in seizing and acting upon results which 
he considered would be ultimately certain, long before they 
had transpired; and so outran his time, that when the 
world overtook him we appeared to be living only what 
had alread_y bei'U recorded. So exceptional was his great- 
ness in this respect, that at times we saw in fancy his name 
already' upon the immortal scroll, and his stately effigy in 
its appro] )riale niche in the temple of Fame. lie passed 
out of this Avorld in the maturity of his manhood, in the 
triumph of the cause which he had so ardently espoused, 
blessed with the esteem and alfection of his countrymen; 
and his deeds and his example will live forever as potential 
forces in the veneration and gratitude of posterity. Thus 



MEETING EST FAXEUIL HAXL. 51 

in this world is his mortahty swallowed u^s in life. His 
spirit has gone to that higher congress above, where the 
noblest and purest of earth sit together forevermore, in the 
presence of that Divine Father and (xuide, who is none 
other than the King of kings and the Lord of lords. 
O grave, thou canst receive of the departed statesman 
only another clod of thy kindred dust; O death, thou art 
robbed of thy shining victory, for again the holy decla- 
ration is fulfilled, and this mortal hath put on unmortality ! 

Hon. Nathaniel P. Banks was then introduced. He said : — 

Mr. Mayok and Fellow-Citizens : The Senate of 
the United States is a de])artment in which is repre- 
sented most carefully and exactly the dignity, capacity 
and patriotism of the Government of the United States. 
It was carefully oi-ganized by the great framers of the 
Constitution and the founders of the Government to 
stand between the extremes of democracy on the one 
side and the aristocracy on the other. It is the tribunal 
selected to pass judgment of the last resort upon the ftiil- 
ing men in every department of the Government. It has 
always discharged its duty faithfully and well, and, al- 
though sometimes liable to be a little on the one side or 
the other of the principle of justice it was intended to 
represent, it stands to us as the accepted representative of 
the general strength and patriotic purpose of the nation 
and the country. Every State has aimed to send to dis- 
charge the duty of representation in this august body, the 
flower of its population and the ablest of its men. Mas- 
sachusetts has been, among others, most happy in this re- 



52 MEMOlilAL OF CHAhJ.K8 SUJMNEIl. 

spect. It numbers as the past Senators of the State in 
this august tribunal, the best, the ablest, the purest of its 
citizens. Sti'ong, Sedgwick, Dexter, John Quiney Adams, 
Otis, Webster, Everett, Choate, "Winthrop, Rantoul, and 
now Sumnei', with many others whose names will spon- 
taneously spring to your hps, stand as the representatives 
of this honored and patriotic State, in that gi'eat body. In 
the choice of Mr. Sumner as the representative of this State, 
many years agone, JMassachusetts, as it appears now, did 
a wise thing, and initiated a most important period of her 
history. And the distinguished Senator who received his 
commission as the I'epresentative of this Commonwealth 
ill that body, looked back througliout the whole of his 
career, as every one of his friends knowing will confess, 
to the State of Massachusetts as the leader, the mistress 
to Avhom he was to look for authority, and to whom he 
could always appeal for suj^port in the discharge of his 
duties on that principle of fidelity to justice which was 
the leading star of his life. He had carefully prepared 
himself for this mission. It was the only public office he 
ever held, with the single exception of a ministerial office 
and a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. In the 
varied acquirements that are necessary to the scholai', the 
legist, the jurist, the orator, the debater, and even the 
judge, no man ever stood higher or stronger. (Applause.) 
He had marked for himself a course of conduct adapted 
to this high magisterial office. He had in the first in- 
stance determined, what I think no other Senator had de- 
termined for himself, that under no circumstances and 
iipon no call, excejjt in connection with public aftairs, 
would he ever leave iiis seat in the Senate of the United 



MEETrVG IX FAXEUIL, HALL. 53 

States ; and, beyond all other men, as the representative 
of this State, he was faithful and true to that rule ; and 
that, although a little thing-, is an important element in the 
estimate of his character. He had fixed his mind upon 
another important point ; he did not look for reputation, 
transitoiy and momentary, by connecting his name with the 
preparation of statutes, representing more or less the ac- 
cidental spirit, or tone of opinion or morals ; he had de- 
termined to look to ideas and principles, and the whole of 
his public life was directed to the discharge of this high 
duty. 

He was the defender of principles and ideas ; he was 
the propagandist of great truths. And when, standing 
alone, in the beginning, he had bi'ought up, on the right 
and on the left, the columns to sustain his ideas in meas- 
ures which he had been prompt to rejiresent, it was an 
even chance if they did not find their leader away ahead 
of the columns just bi'ought up for his support. In this 
way he had a never-ending and still enlarging and glorious 
field of action ; and at the very moment when his spirit 
dejiarted from this world he had undoubtedly conceived 
his future course of conduct with reference to this onward 
progress, to which we may be strangers, and to which we 
would probabl}', but sluggishly and slowly, come up to 
support. In his preparation for duty he was more con- 
scientious and laborious than any man I have known in 
my time. As an illustration I can say from, I think, per- 
sonal knowledge, certainly from authentic information, 
that when a delegate of the city of Boston, or one of the 
towns of the Commonwealth, in a constitutional convention 
of the State of Massachusetts, where the question of pop- 



54 MEMORIAL OF CHARLES SUMNER. 

ular I'cpi'esentation was to be considered and determined, 
he carefully studied every page of the doings of the House 
of Commons and the House of Lords, during the great 
refoi'm struggle, in order to possess himself of the philos- 
ophy as well as the practice and experience of the Avorld 
upon this great question. In every situation in which he 
was jdaced, — when, as a member of the Senate, he was 
excluded from all participation in the work of committees, 
or when, after many years' service, he was unjustly and 
unconstitutioiuiUy deposed from the Chairmanship of the 
Committee on Foreign Relations, — he had but one idea, and 
that was first for humanity, and then for his countiy. [Ap- 
plause.] In these times of pretence and ostentatious 
patriotism, Massachusetts, a}', Mr. Mayor, the city of 
Boston, can ill aft'ord to lose such a man. There is no 
example that leads us to dut}', so bright, so constant, and 
so undying as this ; and there is no service that more 
strongly claims from us recognition and grateful con- 
fession of our obligations. I ought to have said in con- 
nection with the single idea to which I have adverted, 
that in his advocacy of ideas and great truths and im- 
mortal j)i'inciples, and his disregard of the mere phraseology 
or of the framing of measures in which those principles 
Avei-e to be embalmed, he accorded to the spirit and the 
l^ractice of the Government and this country in its purest 
and greatest days. Parliamentary philosophy, parliamen- 
tary law, and the spirit of constitutional legislation, jjre- 
clude and deny to members of these great bodies that 
are to participate in the duty of making laws, the right of 
initiating and framing for themselves the particular meas- 
ures, or the particular form of the measures, in which the 



MEETING EST EANTiUIL HALL. 55 

principles adopted or agreed upon should be embraced or 
represented ; and it was foi' the purpose of representing 
the great principles, and with a view to exchide all pos- 
sibility of the defeat or of the success of measures, upon 
mere personal considerations that this rule was laid 
down. We have unwisely, and to a very great de- 
gree, — I might say almost to a vicious and a criminal 
degree, — departed from this rule ; and within my memory 
it has come to be held that a man was not at liberty to op- 
I^ose anything — any idea, principle or measure — to which 
he had in some form contributed. It is unhealthy and 
unwise. It caiuiot but come to ill ; and it is a practice 
from which we should depart ; but at this moment of sad- 
ness it is a relief and a joy, that throughout the career of 
this illustrious Senator, scholar and legislator, he placed 
no claim to respect or to honor ujion the mere measures 
that are placed upon the statute book. 

It is as the advocate of immortal principles, of immortal 
truths, part of which have been executed and part of 
which are in the future to be fought for and vindicated, 
that the triumph of his life and the honor of his name 
must rest. The citizens of Boston have a right to par- 
ticipate in this honor, to assist in the commemoration of 
these gi-eat triumphs, to drop a tear upon his bier when 
it shall ]-each us, and to anticipate the sad moment by 
assembling in this ancient hall, amid these emblems of 
woe, to honor themselves, the metropolis of the Com- 
monwealth, and the State, as well as its people, by the 
discharge of this duty. [Applause.] 

Tlie Mayor then introduced Hon. William Gaston. He 
said : — 



m 



!\II;M0I!IA[. OV CIIARr.KS SUMN'KR. 



'IMk' <;rc;il iiiiiii who, In llic riiliu'ss ;iii(l coinidctciiess of 
Ills IJiiiK', liMH just piifssed 1,0 his rest, li;ul i\w iiccoinplish- 
nioiits ;iiul gi-accH ol" tlie statesman, of the orator and of" 
llie scliolar. 'IMiese accoinpHshiiieiils attraetcd your admi- 
ral ion. I)ut it is not merely to the statesman, the orator 
and llu' scholar that you render your tribute to-day. You 
recognize sometliing' in the person and in tiie life and 
eharaiter of Charles Snmnei- vvhieh he had not aecjuired 
in the halls of legislation, in the foi-um, or in the schools. 
Von recogni/,e in him that intcgi-ity of ])ur[)ose, that un- 
hcsitatiui;- devotion to duty, to justice and to ti'utli which 
geiu'i-ally lead through liei'cc ()])position, hut always 
lead to li-iumph, and at length cxloi't praises Irom unwilling 
lips. I Applaust'. I You lind in his character a ])lacid and 
detei-mined coiu'age, which feared ucitlu'r ininoi'ities iior 
maj((rilies. His vision seemed to so reach info the fului-e 
as to give him the power of ])roi)hccy. I Ic looked thi-ough 
the clouds which surrounded, or appeared to surround him, 
to the light which lay hcyond them, and hy that light he 
saw the ti-inm|)h of his [)riucii)les and the vindication of 
his fame. South Carolina assailed him with all the bitter- 
ness of hatred; but at llu' lime of her defeat and his vic- 
tory he failed not to be just to her; and if he lived to see 
IVIassaehusetts, his beloved Massachusetts, falter in her 
devoliiui to him, we all i-evcrcn1Iy thauU (<od that he lived 
to see her true to him again. | Ap[ilause. | To-day ]\Ias- 
sachusetts and South Cai'olina unite to do him justice. 
\\\ pui'ily in the public service, and by nnsi'llisli patriot- 
ism, he won the crown, and he wore that ci'owu most 
regally. A life of laboi-, of struggle, and of eonilict has 
ended in victory, in gloi-y, and in peace. 



MEETIXG HSr FANEUIL HALL. 57 

Kev. Edward Everett Hale said : — 

How often he stood here and looked down upon a sea 
of upturned faces when they were not unanimous, Avhen 
they did not agree with each other nor with him! And is 
not that the thing- to be remembered to-day, that he dared 
to say the thiug which Avas right, aUhoiigh he wounded his 
nearest friends, his best friends, and the very peoj^le who 
had loved him and honored him? He was — more than 
once — pierced to the very heart in his public life and in 
his private relations; but still he did his duty and said his 
word, and now we are so grateful that that word was 
spoken and that that duty was done. That homage to the 
right seems to have been what made the man and will 
make his memory. He said, this very winter, to a young 
man who repeated it to me, that when there was any new 
subject of debate, when there Avas any new course to l^e 
adopted, Avheu there was any policy Avhich seemed strange 
or difficult, when there were any of those clouds of 
which we have been speaking, when a new track Avas to 
be found and Avas hard to fmd, he never took counsel Avith 
men at last, but separated himself from men and Avent 
alone and conferred with the highest authority, and Avhen 
he was assured by the highest authority, then he alwa}- s 
went forAvard and asked no question more. [Applause.] 

Is not that the history of his life? I see young men 
around me who think of him simply as an anti-slaA^ery 
leader; who have a feeling that the cause of anti-slaA'eiy 
was the centre of his life. But he did not say so. He said 
that in the early part of his life he looked upon war as the 
great horror, and regarded this bringing of forces together, 



58 SIEMOKIAL OF CIIAliLES SUMNEH. 

ol' mail ag-aiiist man, a.s llie tiling ■wliic-li must be avoided, 
and to be jjut an end to, as the blackest stain on civiliza- 
tion. It Avas because ho hated Avar, it Avas becaiise he 
believed in peace, that iinding- organized Avar in 
this countryj constant Avar between a little handful 
of Avhites and a nation of bhiclvS, finding that in the 
way of permanent peace lie committed himself to the great 
anti-slavery enterprise. That statement seems to me to be 
Avholly illustrative of his life and method. Having got 
hold of the principle, as General Banks has said, having 
got hold of the idea, the central idea, this great idealist 
of our time folloAved that idea Avherever it might lead 
him, and you knoAV Avliere it did lead him. It led him to 
be the beloved leader of Massachusetts. It led him to 
be the foremost man in the Senate of the United States. 
It led him, as has been so gratefully and gracefully said by 
one of the speakers, to be the first friend of the bondman, 
the best beloved of those Avho have led a race of five 
million of men out into freedom. [Applause.] 

And all the time hoAV he did love Massachusetts ! Mas- 
sachusetts did not ahvays shoAV her love to him. Boston 
sometimes Avas very cold to him. Yes, but he did love 
Massachusetts. Just let me read to you a little note of his, 
Avritten in Avhat seemed to be the darkest tunes, just before 
they fired on Fort Sumter. A little note of his, — Avhy, it 
seems to me as if the dead Avere speaking to us as I look 
over it. 

I had Avritten to him to ask some question, — I knoAV not 
Avliat, — some list of maps avc Avanted printed, perhaps. 
This is his reply : — 



MEETIKG IN FAXEUIL HALL. 69 

Washington, 30 Dec, '69. 
My i>ear Hale : I doubt whether anytliing can be done this 
Aviiitcr for ancient history. Tliat of to-day will l)e too absorbing. 
Meanwhile pray keep Massachusetts noble and true at the head 
of the column, where in character and intelligence she belongs. 

Nothing can be gained by subserviency or by acute argument to 
tind Unman Freedom and its safeguards mi constitutional. Not in 
vain have I studied my duty here ; and I know that nothing is 
more impoi'tant than for our dear Couunonwcalth to stand as tihe is 
— precisely ; nor more nor less. 

In the catastrophe wliich is innninent I wish her to hold fast to 
the old flag. Pray help her. But I count upon her governor. 
God bless you ! 

Ever j'ours, Cilveles Sumner. 

" I count iipou her governor," repeated Mr. Hale. [Ap- 
l^lause and cries of "Good."] Young men, remember that, 
and remember who that governor was. In these days, 
when we want to bring the repubhc back morally where 
he left her, remember that that great man in the darkest 
moment counted upon her governor. [" Good " and 
apphiiise.] 

There is ahttle story which I heard yesterday, and which 
I cannot help repeating here, because I see so many boys, 
so many young men, here who don't remember those days 
of dark time. It was this: That he singled out a young 
man not long ago, as if he knew he was going to die, he 
put his hand on his shoulder and said, ■■ It is on you, 3'oung 
men, that we rely, and remember, young man, that char- 
acter is everything." And in this last month, when in the 
midst of one of those petty personal intrigues at Wash- 
ington, which will not, except by accident, go into history, 



GO MEMORIAL OP^ CHARLES SU:MXER. 

a Senator of the United States — I should think one of the 
meaner sort, but I do not laiow Avho — when sueh a Senator 
said to him, "Mr. Sumner, how will this alieet yom* 
eleeti(jn ? " he said, " What? Aftect what? " — " Atfeet 
your eleetion?" — " AVhat election do you speak of?" 
— " AAHiy, next year, in 1875, the period of your re-election 
comes round." He had not been thinking of that at all. 
This Avas no play of his; there was nothing artificial in it; 
he did not laiow what election was being spoken of; but 
when he was reminded of it he said, " Oh, yes! so it will! — 
my re-election would come round in 1875, but I may die 
long before that, and as long as I live I can do my duty." 
[Cries of "Good" and applause.] Eemenil)er that, you 
boys who have threescore of life before you yet; remem- 
ber that so hmg as you live, though it be threescore years, 
through all these years you c-an do your duty. [Applause.] 
AN^ill any man of us read such a sermon as that to-morrow? 
[Ajiplause.] 

The resolutions Avere then luinninionslj' adopted. The INIayor 
gave notice that the linll would ))c open to the puhlic durhig the 
remainder of the day and on Suiidav and ^Monday. 

Hon. "William Gray offered an additional resohition to the effect 
that tlie merchants of Boston ))e riMjuested to close their places of 
business on Monday at twelve o'clock, the day of the funeral, and 
that the flags on the shiiiping in the harbor be placed at lialf-mast. 
The resolution was adoi)ted, and the meeting then adjourned. 

The following letters were received : — 

Katick, INEarch 13, 1874. 
Hon. Alex AXDi'.u II. Kick: — 

My dear Sir: Your note is received, conveying to 
me the I'crjuest of the conmiittee, ap[)ointed to invite 



MEETHSTG IK FAXEUIL HALL. 61 

speakers for the meeting in Fanenil Hall to-morrow. 
While I hojie to be present and listen to the voices of 
others, I am compelled to be silent. Bnt no jaoor words 
of mine can deepen the affection, and increase the admira- 
tion for, or add to the fame of, the illustrious son of Mas- 
sachusetts, whose sudden death the nation deplores. We 
have been friends for thirty years, and it was my privilege 
to aid in placing him in the Senate of the United States, 
and to sit by his side there for more than eighteen event- 
ful years. I have seen him in days of trial, disappoint- 
ment, disaster; and in seasons, too, of successful triumphs, 
and I have witnessed his faith, hope, resolution, courage, 
and his tireless labors. In his death impartial liljerty has 
lost a devoted champion, the country a true pati'iot and 
pui'e statesman, and republican institutions throughout the 
world a sympathizing and undoubting friend. He had 
lived to see the expiration of slavery and the triumph of 
the Union. But trials, and disappointments, and sickness 
came to him, though none but intimate friends knew how 
bravely he bore them. While, however, he greatly feared 
he might become incapacitated for lal)or and further use- 
fulness, he had no dread of death. Less than one year 
ago, while sitting alone with him in his room, giving him 
that advice — so easy to give, and so hard to take — to 
cease from labor and take the mnch-needed rest, he said 
to me with great earnestness: "If my works were com- 
])leted and my civil-rights bill passed, no visitor could 
enter that door that would be more welcome than death." 
The failure to complete that allotted task was his regret 
in his last moments, and the civil-rights bill he commended 
to an honored colleaa-uc and friend. Lovinc; hands will 



62 MEMOEIAL OP CHAKLES SUMNER. 

complete tliat unfinished work, which the stutlcnt will read, 
and the historian, who would trace the great events of the 
last quarter of a century, will not fail carefully to stndy. 
And, as we bear him to his burial, may we not hope that 
his last injunction will l)e heeded, and that the provisions 
of his civil-rights bill will be incorpoi'ated by the nation 
into its legislation, and that " the equality befoi-e the law," 
which was so long the inspii'ation of his unfiagging efforts, 
may be assured to all, withont distinction of race or color. 

Very respectiuUy, yonrs, 

IlENltY WiLSOX. 

57 Mt. Yeisnon Street, March 13, 1874. 
liKirAKD II. Daxa, Jr., Esq.: — 

My dear Mr. Dana: I i-egret much that an engage- 
ment previously made, must prevent me from joining you 
in the proceedings in honor of our hite friend, contem- 
jilatcd to-morrow in Faneuil Ilall. It would have given 
me a moui'nful satisfaction to contribute my mite to the 
gcnei'al testimony borne to his long and arduous labors in 
the country's service, and more particularly to that por- 
tion of them with which you and I were both most famil- 
iar. It is now nearly thirty years since we became asso- 
ciated in the prosecution of one great refoi'm in the 
political institutions of this country. It is more than 
twenty years since Mr. Sumner attained a position that 
enabled him the most fully to develop his great powers to 
the attainment of that end. How much he exerted him- 
self diu'ing the early days of severe trial, and liow deeply 
he snfl'ered in his own person as a })eualty for his cour- 



MEETING rS' FANTLUIL HALL. 63 

ageoiis persistence in denouncing wrong, the public know 
too well to need further ilUistration at this time. Like 
most reformers, he possessed that species of ardor and 
impetuosity which seem almost indispensable to roiise 
the sympathy and secui-e the co-operation of the great 
and controlling masses of the people of a republic, in the 
difficult work of changing settled convictions at the haz- 
ard of overtnrning chei'ished institutions. The trial was 
a very costly one, we all admit; but when we look to sec 
how it has cleared us from the most threatening evil that 
weighed upon the minds of the early founders of the 
republic, we cannot be too thankful to each and all of the 
intrepid band who took the lead in the work of i-enova- 
tion, and persistently cari-ied it on to the glorious end. 
Among that number the name of Charles Sumner must 
ever remain blazoned in the most conspicuous characters. 
To the attainment of this great end two qualities were 
indis2:)ensable — and both of these belonged to Mr. Sum- 
ner. One of them Avas firmness, which insured persist- 
ency over all obstacles. The second was personal integ- 
rity, nmissailable by any form of temptation, however 
specious. After nearly a quarter of a century of trial, 
there is not a trace left of the power of any temptation, 
either in the form of pecuniary profit or the much more 
dangerous one of management for place. He was pure 
throughout, and this was the crowning honor of his great 
career. 

I am very truly yours, 

CiiAULEs FK^iJsxis Adams. 



THE FUNEEAL 



THE FUNEEAL 



Funcr.il services were held in the Senate Chuuibcr at the jSTa- 
tional Capitol on Frida^y, the thirteenth of ilarcli, and at the 
conehision the presiding ofticer said : — 

And now the Senate of the United States entrusts the 
remains of Charles Smnner to its Sei'geant-at-Arms and 
the Committee appointed to convey them to their home, 
there to commit them "earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust 
to dust," in the soil of the Commonwealth of Massachu- 
setts. "Peace to his ashes!" 

The I)ody was then placed on hoard a special train, which ar- 
rived in this city on Satnrday evening. The Congressional Com- 
mittee consisted of Messrs. Henry B. Anthony, of Rhode Island ; 
Carl Schnrz, of Missouri ; Aaron A. Sargent, of California ; John 
P. Stockton, of New Jersey ; Richard J. Oglesby, of Illinois ; 
and Thomas C. McCreeiy, of Kentucky, on the part of the Sen 
ate; and Stephen A. Hurlbut, of Illinois; Eugene Hale, of 
Maine ; Charles Foster, of Ohio ; Joseph H. Raiuey, of South 
Carolina; Charles Clayton, of California; Henry J. Scudder, of 
New York ; Sanuiel J. Randall, of Pennsylvania ; James B. 
Beck, of Kentucky ; and John Hancock, of Texas, on the part 
of the House of Representatives. The INIassachusetts delegation 
in Congress accompanied the Conunittee. 



08 MEMORIAL OF CHAllLKS SUMNKR. 

By iiivilalioii of the State authorities, who had charge of the 
matter, the Mayor and tlie Coiuniittce of the City Coiineil were 
in adciidaiicc at (lie railway station on the arrival of the train, and 
(nnncd a part of Iho escort to Uie State House. His Excellency 
the (lo\cnior. and tlic lv\c(iiti\t' Council, were in 'waiting in 
Doric Hall; and, after the escort had entered. Senator Anthonj', 
Chairman of the Congressional Committee, said: — 



jNFay it please your Excellency: AVc are eoni- 
mniuk'd by the Senate of the United States, to render 
back to you your illustrious dead. Nearly a quarter of a 
century ago, you dedicated to the public service a man 
who was even then greatly distiuguished. lie remained 
in it, quickening its j^atriotism, informing its councils and 
leading in its deliberations, until, having survived in con- 
liiuious service all his original associates, he has closed 
his earthly career. With reverent hands we bring to you 
his uH)i'tal i)art, that it may be conuniited to the soil of 
the Commonwealth, already renowned, that gave him 
bii-th. Take it; it is yours. The part which we do not 
return to you is not wholly yours to receive, nor altogether 
oui's to give. It belongs to the country, to mankind, to 
Ireedom, to civilization, to humanity. We come to you 
with emblems of mourning which faintly typify the sorrow 
that dwells in the breasts upon which they lie. So much 
is due to the infirmity of hinnan nature. But, in the view 
of reason and philosophy, is it not rather a matter of 
exultation, that a life so jmre in its personal qualities, so 
high in its pnljlic aims, so fortunate in the fruition of noble 
etibrt, has closed safely belbre age liad mari-ed its intel- 



THE FUKERAL. 69 

lectual vigor, before time had dimmed the lustre of its 
genius? 

May it 2>l^(ise your Excellency — our mission is com- 
pleted. We commit to you the body of Charles Sumner. 
His undying fame the muse of history has already taken 
hi her keeping. 

The Governor thanked the Coinniittee for the manner in Mhich 
they had discharged the trust reposed iu them, and stated that 
the Committee of the Legislature appointed for the pin-pose 
would take charge of the remains and arrange for their final dis- 
position. 

A guard of honor was then detailed from the Second Battalion 
of Infautiy, Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, under the com- 
mand of Major Lewis Gaul ; and the hody was laid iu state in 
Doric Hall, where it was visited, during the following day, hy a 
vast number of people. 

The State funeral took place on Monday, in King's Chapeb and 
was attended by the City Government in a bod3% The bells of the 
churches were tolled, and the flags on all the pul^lic buildings anel 
l^ublic grounds were displayed at half-mast. The services were 
conducted by the Eeverend Henrv W. Foote ; and, at the con- 
clusion, the remains were conveyed to Mount Aubiu'u. The fol- 
lowing gentlemen acted as pall-bearers : Henry W. Longfellow, 
Ealph "Waldo Emerson, Charles Francis Adams, John G. AVhit- 
tier, Robert C. Winthrop, John IL Clirtbrd. Emory Washl)urn, 
Nathaniel P. Banks, Alexander IL Bullock, William Clatlin, 
George T^der Bisrelow. 



MEMORIAL SEEVICES. 



MEMORIAL SERVICES. 



The Committee of the City Council appointed under the reso- 
lutions in relation to the death of Charles Sumner, having de- 
cided, on the 18th of March, to make arrangements for memorial 
services iu Music Hall, His Houor the Mayor was requested to 
select a suitable person to deliver an address on the life and 
character of the departed statesman. In compliance with that 
request, an invitation was immediately sent to the Honorable 
Carl Schm-z, of the United States Senate, whose personal and 
2iolitical relations with Mr. Sumner, during many years, gave him 
peculiar qualilicatious for the task. 

The invitation was accepted, and the twenty-ninth of April was 
lixed as the time for holding the sei'vices. Among those officially 
invited by the Committee in behalf of the City Council, were the 
following : His Excellency the Governor, and the members of liis 
personal staff; the Executive Council ; the Heads of State Depart- 
ments ; the members of the Senate and House of Representatives 
of Massachusetts ; United States Officers — civil and military — 
located in this city ; the foreign Consuls ; the Judges of the Su- 
preme, Superior and Municipal Courts ; the jDast Governors of the 
Commonwealth ; the past Mayors of the city ; the Executive Com- 
mittee of the Board of Trade ; the Sumner Memorial Committee ; 
the President and Fellows of Harvard College ; the Board of 
Overseers of Harvard College ; the classmates of Mr. Sumner ; 
the Officers of the Massachusetts Historical Society ; the Trustees 
of the ]\Iuseum of Fine Arts, and personal friends. 



74 MEMORIAL OF CHAKLES SUMNER. 

The clc'siro tf) gain admission to the services was so great that 
it was found necessary, in order to exercise a proper control over 
the proceedings, to admit only by tickets. The hall was tastefnlly 
decorated with flowers. A tine portrait of Sumner, painted by 
Dr. E. M. Parker, was hung in front of the organ. 

At three o'clock the services were opened with a voluntary on 
the org;m by Mr. B. J. Lang. The following invocation was 
then sung by members of the Apollo Club. 

Hear us. Almighty One! 
Hear us, all Holy One! 

Dark rolls the battle before us. 
Father, all praise to Thee! 
Father, all thanks to Theo! 

That freedom's banner is o'er us. 

Like a consuming brand, 
Stretch forth Thy mighty hand. 

Over oppression victorious. 
Help us maintain the right! 
Help us, O God of might! 

Help us. Thy cause must Ije glorious. 

Help us, though we maj' fall ; 
From out the grave we call, 

Praise to Thy mercy forever. 
All power and glory be 
Thine through eternity. 

Help us. Almighty One! 
Amen. Amen. 

The Mayor asked the attention of the assembly while praj'er 
was ofl'ered by the Reverend Phillips Brooks. 

Let us prat: Almighty God, father of our souls and 
master of all the destinies of men, open the gates of thy 



MEMOKIAL SERVICES. 75 

presence, we beseech thee, to thy children, and let them 
enter in to thee. We dare not speak of the great men 
who are thy gifts, except in thy presence, filled with thy 
love and enlightened by thy inspiration. Father, we thank 
thee for the character of the great man whom we com- 
memorate to-day. We thank thee for his trnth and ear- 
nestness. When men trembled at dnty, and were afraid 
of it, he did it faithfully. When corruption hung like a 
pestilence over our laud, he stood up above it, brave and 
pure. His heart was full of care for the humblest of the 
race and the most oppressed. We thank thee, our Father, 
for the truth and manliness that filled his life. We know 
that the character of a good man is thy best gift to thy 
children, and so we thank thee, first of all, and most of 
all, that this thy servant was what he was. And we thank 
thee, also, for the work which it was permitted him to do. 
As we stand and look around and see the prosperity and 
peace, the liberty and truth, and justice that so largely 
pervade our land, we see in that the fruit of the seed 
which he helped to plant; the issue of the struggle in 
which he lived and suffered. We rejoice to-day for him, 
O Father, that thou didst give him so abundantly of that 
which he loved the best, the privilege of serving his native 
country. Wherever, O God, the work that Sumner tried 
to do, still lingers incomplete, wherever any bond to the 
world of sin still i-emains, whei-ever man still dares to for- 
get righteousness, wherever any false standards still infest 
the purity of public life, and fiilsify and retard the work 
in which thou didst so richly use this servant whom thou 
hast taken to thyself — give us great men. Give us 
strong, good men, who shall thoroughly know thy will 



76 MEMORIAL OF CIIAELES SUM^^ER. 

aiid teach it to lis all, and who, by the strength that thou 
shalt give to them, shall lead thy people in thy way. We 
beg thy blessing, O our Father, to rest xipon oui* State 
and u])ou our land. Give wisdom and strength to the 
President of the United States, and to all others in anthoi- 
ity. Give, we implore thee, unto him who shall sit in the 
chair which our great Senator has left empty, a heart and 
mind as ])ure as his. Teach all our senators wisdom, and 
be thyself the Governor of those whom thou hast set to 
govern us. And now, what shall we ask, O Father, for 
oui'selves as we stand here desirous to commemorate the 
great man whom thou hast taken to thyself, the good and 
faithful servant whom thou hast called away? What can 
we ask but that our own living shall be doubly conse- 
crated to our duties? In deeper purity, in more cndui-ing 
unsellishness, in broader wisdom, in a courage that noth- 
ing can frighten, and an integrity that nothing can seduce, 
may we be wholly consecrated to duty, and may we lay 
our humble lives, like strong", unnoticed stones in that 
sti'ucture of righteousness and truth, and wisdom, which 
thou art building in our land. To some such self-conse- 
cration may Ave all be uplifted by the memorial service 
of to-day. 

TIic following hymn, which lind ))een written for tin; occiisiou 
by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, was then sung to ;i '* Ilollaud 
National Air." 

(_)nce more, yc sacred towers, 

Your .solemn dirgjes sound ; 
Strew, loving- hands, the April llowors, 

Onee more to deck his mound ; 



MEMORIAL SERVICES. 77 

A Nation mourns its dead, 
Its sorrowing voices one, 
As Israel's luoiiarcli bowed his head 
And cried " My son ! My son ! " 

Why mourn for him ? — • For liim 

The welcome angel came 
Ere yet his eye with age was dim, 

Or bent his stately frame ; 

His weajjon still was briglit. 

His shield was lifted high 
To slay the wrong, to save the right, 

What happier hour to die? 

Thou orderest all tilings well ; 

Thy servant's work was done ; 
He lived to hear Oppression's knell, 

The shouts for freedom won. 

Hark ! From the opening skies 

The anthem's echoing swell, — 
" O mourning Land, lift ui> tliine eyes ! 

God reigneth. All is well ! " 



Mr. Wendell Phillips then introduced the orator in the follow- 
ing words : — 

Mr. Mator and Felloav-Citizens : The Common- 
wealth has met with an irreparable loss — a loss which it 
tasks our language to describe. A consecrated life 
bravely and solemnly ended ! A great work left, in the 
providence of God, unfinished — the completion of which 
not many of us, I fear, will now live to see. We meet to 
pay another tribute, of respect to the memory of the great- 
est man and the purest, that Massachusetts has lent to the 
national councils during this generation or the last ; the 



io MEMORIAL OF CHABLES SUMISTEE. 

one who has done the JSTation more service and earned the 
State more honor than any other. If we measure great- 
ness by rare abihties, lofty purpose, grand achievement 
and a sjjotless life, then neither in this generation nor in 
the last has Massachusetts any jjolitical name worthy to 
stand by the side of Charles Sumner, — the last martyr, 
literally a martyr, — in the cause of free speech and per- 
sonal libei-ty. We meet to contemplate his portrait drawn 
by a master hand. E'o loving and partial friendship, begun 
in boyhood, and grown closer year by year, will hold the 
pencil. No State or City pride will unduly heighten the 
colors. And this is Avell. For Sumner belonged, not to 
Massachusetts alone, but to the Nation and the world. 
From the lijjs of one born in a foreign land and dwelling 
in afar-off State, — one who shared our great Senator's offi- 
cial labors, was his comrade in study and liis near 
friend, — from such a one we shall hear the verdict, — the 
sober and dispassionate verdict which the world and pos- 
terity will render, — which history, proud other trust, will 
carry down to other generations. And as long as men 
love justice and hate oppression, as long as they value the 
devotion of great powers to the welfare of the race, as 
long as they need to learn how the battle for liberty is to 
be won when fought against almost hopeless odds, so long, 
Ave may be sure, they Avill lovingly guard the record. As 
such an historian, in this sad, proud hour of bereavement, 
I have the honor to introduce the Hon. Mr. Scluu-z, of 
Missouri. 

Mr. Schurz, rising, shook Iiiuuls Avith Mr. Phillips, :iiul pro- 
ceeded to deliver his address. Avhieh occupied tAvo hours and twenty 



MKMOIMAL SERVICES. 79 

minutes. It was listened to thvoughont witli earnest attention, 
and was I'reqiiontly interrupted hy licarty applause. At the con- 
clusion a liencdiction was pronounced by Rev. Mr. Brooks, and 
the assembly dispersed. 



THE EULOGY, BY GAEL SCHURZ. 



EULOGY 



When the news went forth, " Chai-los Sumner is dead," 
a tremor of strange emotion was felt all over the land. It 
was as if a magnificent star, a star niilike all others, which 
the living generation had been wont to behold fixed and 
innnovable above their heads, had all at once disappeared 
from the sky, and the people stared into the great void 
darkened by the sudden absence of the familiar light. 

On the 16th of March a funeral procession passed 
through the streets of Boston. Uncounted thousands of 
men, women and children had assembled to see it pass. 
l^o uncommon pageant had attracted them ; no military 
parade with glittering uniforms and gay banners ; no 
pompous array of dignitaries in official robes ; nothing 
but carriages and a hearse with a coffin, and in it the 
corpse of Charles Sumner. But there they stood, — a 
multitude immeasurable to the eye, rich and poor, white 
and black, old and young, — in gi-ave and mournful silence, 
to bid a last sad farewell to him who Avas being borne to his 
grave. And every bieeze from every point of the com- 
pass came loaded with a sigh of sorrow. Indeed, there 
was not a city or town in this great Republic which would 
not have surrounded that funeral procession vvith the 
same spectacle of a profound and universal sense of 
crreat bereavement. 



84 MEMOKIAI. OF CIIAKLES SUMNEK. 

Was it love ; was it gratitude for the services rendered 
to the people ; was it the baffled expectation of greater 
service still to come ; was it admiration of his talents or 
his virtues that inspired so general an emotion of sorrow? 

He had stood aloof from the multitude ; the friendship 
of his heart had been given to but few ; to the many he 
had appeared distant, self-satisfied and cold. His public 
life had been full of bitter conflicts. No man had aroused 
against himself fiercer animosities. Although warmly 
recognized by many, the public sei'vices of no man had 
been more acrimoniously questioned by opponents. No 
statesman's motives, qualities of heart and mind, wisdom 
and character, exce23t his integrity, had been the subject 
of more heated controversy ; and yet, when sudden death 
snatched him from us, friend and foe bowed their heads 
alike. 

Every patriotic citizen felt poorer than the day before. 
Every true American heart trembled with the apprehen- 
sion that the Republic had lost something it could iU 
spare. 

Even from far distant lands, across the ocean, voices 
came, mingling their sympathetic grief with our own. 

When you, Mr. Mayor, in the name of the City Gov- 
ei-nment of Boston, invited me to interpret that which 
millions think and feel, I thanked you for the proud 
]irivilege you had conferred upon me, and the invitation 
appealed so irresistibly to my fi'iendship for the man we 
had lost, that I could not decline it. 

And yet, the thought struck me that you might have 
prepared a greater triumph to his niemoiy, had you 
summoned, not me, his friend, but one of those who 



EULOGY BY CARL SCIIURZ. 85 

had stood against him in the struggles of his hfe, to beai' 
testimony to Charles Sumner's virtues. 

There are many among them to-day, to whose sense of 
justice you might have safely confided the office, which 
to me is a task of love. 

Here I see his friends around me, the friends of his 
youth, of his manhood, of his advancing age ; among 
them, men whose illustrious names are household words 
as far as the English tongue is spokeu, and far beyond. 
I saw them standing round his open grave, when it 
received the flower-decked coffin, mute sadness heavily 
clouding their brows. I understood their gi'ief, for 
nobody could share it more than I. 

In such a presence, the temptation is great to seek 
that consolation for our loss which bereaved friendship 
finds in the exaltation of its bei-eavement. But not to 
you or me Ijclonged this man while he lived; not to joii 
or me belongs his memory now that he is gone. His 
deeds, his example, and his fame, he left as a legacy to 
the American people and to mankind; and it is my office 
to speak of this inheritance. I cannot speak of it with- 
out affection. I shall endeavor to do it with justice. 

Among the public charactei's of America, Charles 
Sumner stands peculiar and unique. His senatorial career 
is a conspicuous part of our political history. But in or- 
der to appi-eciate the man in the career, we must look at 
the story of his life. 

The American people take pride in saying that almost 
all their great historic characters were self-made men, who, 
without the advantages of wealth and early opportunities, 
won their education, raised themselves to usefulness and 



8(3 MEMORIAL OF CHARLES SUMKEII. 

distinction, and achieved their gTeatnesc; througli a rugged 
liand-to-liand .struggle with advoi'se fortune. It is indeed 
so. A log cabin; a ragged httle boy walking barefooted 
to a lowly conntry school-house, or sometimes no school- 
house at all; — a lad, after a day's hard toil on the farm, 
or in the workshop, poring greedily, somctiuies stealthily, 
over a voliune of poetry, or history, or travels ; — a foi'lorn- 
looking youth, with elbows out, applying at a lawyer's 
othce for an o]i})ort unity to stud}'; — then the young man 
a successful practitioner attracting the notice of his neigh- 
bors; — then a member of a State Legislature, a repre- 
sentative in Congress, a Senator, maybe a Cabinet Minis- 
ter, or even President. Such are the pictures presented 
by many a proud American biogi-aphy. 

And it is natural that the American people should be 
proud of it, lor such a biograph}' condenses in the 
compass of a single life the great story of the American 
nation, as from the feebleness and misery of early set- 
tlements in the bleak solitude it advanced to the subju- 
gation of the hostile forces of nature; plunged into an ar- 
duous struggle with dangers and difficulties only known 
to itself, gathering strength from every couflict and expe- 
rience from every trial; with undaunted pluck widening the 
I'ange of its experiments and creative action, until at last 
it stands there as one of the greatest powei's of the earth. 
The people are fond of seeing their image reflected in the 
lives of their ibremost representative men. 

But not such a life was that of Charles Sumner. He 
was descended from good old Kentish yeomanry stock, 
men stalwart of frame, stout of heai't, who used to stand 
in the front of the ilerce battles of Old England; and the 



EULOGY BY GAEL SGIIUP.Z. 87 

first of the name who came to America had certainly not 
been exempt from the rough struggles of the early settle- 
ments. But already from the year 1723 a long line of 
Sumners appears on the records of Harvard College, and 
it is evident that the love of study had long been heredi- 
tary in the family. Charles Pinckney Sumner, the Sena- 
tor's father, was a graduate of Harvard, a lawyer by 
profession, for fourteen years High Sheriff of Suffolk 
county. His literary tastes and acquirements and his 
stately pohteness are still remembered. He was altogether 
a man of high respectability. 

He was not rich, but in good circumstances; and Avell 
able to give his children the best opportunities to study, 
without working for their daily bread. 

Charles Sumner was born in Boston, on the Gth of Jan- 
uary, 1811. At the age of ten he had received his rudi- 
mentary training; at fifteen, after having gone through 
the Boston Latin School, he entered Haivard College, and 
plunged at once with fervor into the classics, polite liter- 
ature and history. Graduated in 1830, he entered the 
Cambridge Law School. InToav life began to open to him. 
Judge Story, his most distinguished teacher, soon recog- 
nized in him a young man of uncommon stamp; and an 
intimate friendship sprang up between teacher and pupil, 
which was severed only by death. 

He began to distinguish himself, not only by the most 
arduous industry and application, pushing his researches 
far beyond the text-books, — indeed, text-books never sat- 
isfied him, — but by a striking eagerness and faculty to 
master the original principles of the science, and to trace 
them through its development. 



8» MEMORIAL OF CIIAKLES SUMNER 

Ills productive labor began, and I find it stated that 
already then, while he was yet a pupil, his essays, published 
in the "American Jurist," were "always characterized by 
breadth of view and accuracy of learning, and sometimes 
l)y remarkably subtle and ingenious investigations." 

Leaving the Law School, he entered the office of a 
lawyer in Boston, to acquire a knowledge of practice, 
never much to his taste. Then he visited Washington for 
the first time, little dreaming what a theati'e of action, 
struggle, triumph and sutfering the national city was to 
become for him; for then he came only as a studious, deep- 
ly interested looker-on, who merely desired to form the 
acquaintance of the justices and practising lawyers at the 
bar of the Supreme Court. He was received with marked 
kindness by Chief Justice Marshall, and in later years he 
loved to tell his friends how he had sat at the feet of that 
great magistrate, and learned there what a judge should 
be. 

Having been admitted to the bar in AVorcester in IS^i, 
when twenty-three years old, he opened an office in Bos- 
ton, was soon appointed reporter of the United States 
Circuit Court, published three volumes containing Judge 
Story's decisions, known as " Sumner's Reports," took 
Judge Story's place from time to time as lecturer in the 
Harvard Law School; also Professor Greenleaf's, who 
was absent, and edited during the years 1835 and 183(3 
Andrew Dunlap's Treatise on Admiralty Practice. Be- 
yond this, his studies, arduous, incessant and thorough, 
ranged far and wide. 

Truly a studious and laboiious young man, who took 



EULOGY BY C^VEL SCHUKZ. 89 

the business of life earnestly in hand, determined to kiiOAv 
something-, and to be useful to his time and country. 

But what he had learned and could learn at home did 
not satisfy his craving. In 1837 he went to Europe, 
armed Avith a letter from Judge Stoiy's hand to the law 
magnates of England, to whom his patron introduced him 
as " a young lawyer, giving promise of the most eminent 
distinction in his profession, Avitli truly extraordinary 
attainments, literary and judicial, and a gentleman of the 
highest purity and jiropriety of character." 

That was not a mere complimentary introduction ; it 
was the conscientious testimony of a great judge, who 
well knew his responsibility, and who afterwards, when 
his death approached, adding to that testimony, was fre- 
quently heard to say, " I shall die content, as far as my 
professorshii^ is concerned, if Charles Sumner is to succeed 
me." 

In England, young Sumner, only feeling hmiself stand- 
ing on the threshold of life, was received like a man of 
already achieved distinction. Every circle of a society, 
ordinarily so exclusive, was open to huu. Often, by invi- 
tation, he sat with the judges in Westminster Hall. Ee- 
nowned statesmen introduced him on the floor of the 
Houses of Parliament. Eagerly he followed the debates, 
and studied the principles and practice of parliamentary 
law on its maternal soil, where from the first seed corn it 
had grown up into a magnificent tree, in whose shadow 
a great people can dwell in secure enjoyment of their 
rights. Scientific associations received him as a welcome 
guest, and thejearoied and great Avillingly opened to his 



90 MEMOIUAL OF CIIAIJLES SUMNEU. 

Av'mniiig" jiresunce their stores of knowledg'e and .states- 
manship. 

In Franee he listened to the eminent men of the Law 
Sehool in Paris, at the Sorbonne and the College de 
France, and with many of the statesmen of that eoiintiy 
he maintained instructive intercourse. In Italy he gave 
himself up to the charms of art, poetry, history, and classi- 
cal literature. In Germany he enjoyed the conversation 
of Humboldt, of Kanke the historian, of Hitter the geog- 
rapher, and of the great jurists, Savigny, Thibaut, and 
Mittermaier. 

Two years after his return, the " London Quartei-ly Re- 
view " said of his visit to Lngland, " He presents in his own 
person a decisive pi'oof that an American gentleman, 
without official rank or wide-spread rej)utation, by mere 
dint of courtes3% candor, an entire absence of pretension, 
an appreciating spirit and a cultured mind, may be 
]-eceived on a perfect footing of equality in the best 
circles, social, political and intellectual." 

It nnist luu e 1)een true, for it came from a quarter not 
given to the habit of llattering Americans l^eyond their de- 
serts. And Charles Sunnier was not then the senator of 
power and fame; he was only the young son of a late 
sherilf of Sulfolk County in Massachusetts, who had 
neither riches nor station, but who possessed that most 
winning charm of youth, — purity of soul, modesty of 
conduct, cultiu-e of mintl, an earnest thirst of knowledge, 
and a brow bearing the stamp of noble manhood and the 
l^romise of future achievements. 

He returned to his native shores in 1840, himself like a 



EULOGY BY CARL SCHUKZ. 91 

heavily freighted ship, bearing a rich cargo of treasures 
collected in foreign lands. 

He resumed the j^ractice of law in Boston ; but, as I 
find it stated, "not with remarkable success in a financial 
point of view." That I readily believe. The financial 
point of view was never to him a fruitful source of inspi- 
ration. Again he devoted himself to the more congenial 
task of teaching at the Cambridge Law School, and of 
editing an American edition of "Yesey's Reports," in 
twenty volumes, with elaborate notes contributed by 
himself. 

But now the time had come when a new field of action 
was to open itself to him. On the 4th of July, 1845, 
he delivered before the City Authorities of Boston, 
an address on "The True Grandeur of Nations." 
So far he had been only a student, — a deep and arduous 
one, and a writer and a teacher, but nothing more. On 
that day his public career commenced. And his first 
public address disclosed at once the peculiar impulse and 
inspirations of his heart, and the tendencies of his mind. 
It was a plea for universal peace, — a poetic rhapsody on 
the wrongs and horrors of war, and the beauties of con- 
cord ; not, indeed, without solid argument, but that 
argument clothed in all the gorgeousness of historical 
illustration, classic imagery, and fervid efi'usion, rising 
high above the level of existing conditions, and picturing 
an ideal future, — the universal reign of justice and char- 
ity, — not far ofl:' to his own imagination, but far beyond 
the conceptions of living society ; but to that society he 
addressed the urgent summons, to go forth at once in 
pursuit of this ideal consummation ; to transform all 

2 



92 MEMORIAL OF CHARLES SUMNTER. 

swords into jiloughshares, and all war-ships into peaceful 
merchantmen, without delay ; believing that thus the 
nation would rise to a greatness never known before, 
which it could accomplish if it only willed it. 

And this speech he delivered while the citizen soldiery 
of Boston in festive array were standing before him, and 
while the very air was stirred by the premonitory mutter- 
ings of an approaching war. 

The whole man i-evealed himself in that utterance; a 
soul full of the native instinct of justice; an overpowering 
sense of right and wrong, which made him look at the 
problems of human society from the lofty plane of an ideal 
morality, which fixed for him, high beyond the existing 
condition of things, the aims for which he must strive, and 
inspired and fired his ardent natui-e for the struggle. His 
education had singularly fixvored and developed that ideal 
tendency. It was not that of the self-made man in the 
common acceptation of the word. The distracting sti-ug- 
gles for existence, the small, harassing cares of every-day 
life had remained foreign to him. His education was that 
of the favored few. He found all the avenues of knowl- 
edge wide open to him. All that his country could give 
he had: the most renowned schools; the living instruction 
of the most elevating personal associations. It was the 
education of the typical young English gentleman. Like 
the English gentleman, also, he travelled abroad to widen 
his mental horizon. And again, all that foreign countries 
could give he had: the instruction of great lawyers and 
men of science, the teachings and example of statesmen, 
the charming atmosphere of poetry and art which graces 
and elevates the soul. He had also learned to work, to 



ETJLOGT BY CARL SCHURZ. 93 

work hard and with a purpose, and at thirty-four, when he 
first appeared conspicuously before the people, he could 
already point to many results of his labor. 

But his principal work had been an eager accumula- 
tion of knowledge in his own mind, an accumulation most 
extraoi'dinary in its scope and variety. His natural incli- 
nation to search for fundamental princij^les and truths had 
been favored by his opportunities, and all his industry in 
collecting knowledge became subservient to the building 
up of his ideals. Having not been tossed and jostled 
through the school of want and adversity, he lacked, what 
that school is best apt to develop, — keen, practical in- 
stincts, sharpened by early struggles, and that sober ap- 
preciation of the realities and possibilities of the times 
which is forced upon men by a hard contact with the 
world. He judged life from the stillness of the student's 
closet and from his intercourse with the refined and 
elevated, and he acquired little of those experiences 
which might have dampened his zeal in working for his 
ideal aims, and staggered his faith in their realization. 
His mind loved to move and operate in the realm of ideas, 
not of things; in fact, it could scarcely have done other- 
wise. Thus nature and education made him an idealist, — 
and, indeed, he stands as the most pronounced idealist 
among the public men of America. 

He was an ardent friend of liberty, not like one of those 
who have themselves suffered oppression and felt the gall- 
ing weight of chains; nor like those Avho in the common 
walks of life have experienced the comfort of wide elbow- 
room and the quickening and encouraging influence of 
free institutions fov the practical work of society. But to 



94 MEMOr.IAI. OF CHARLES SIT>rNT:R. 

him liberty Avas the ideal goddess clothed in sublime 
attributes of surpassing beauty and beneficence, giving to 
evei'y human being his eternal rights, showering around 
her the treasures of her blessings, and lifting up the lowly 
to an ideal existence. 

In the same ethereal light stood in his mind the repub- 
lic, his country, the law, the future organization of the 
great family of nations. 

That idealism was sustained and quickened, not merely 
l.)y his vast learning and classical inspirations, but by that 
rare and excjuisite purity of life, and high moral sensitive- 
ness, which he had preserved intact and fresh through all 
the temptations of his youth, and which remained intact 
and fresh down to his last day. 

Such was the man, when, in the exuberant vigor of man- 
hood, he entered public life. Until that time he had enter- 
tained no aspirations for a political career. When dis- 
cussing with a friend of his youth — now a man of fame, 
— what the future might have in store for them, he said: 
"You may be a Senator of the United States some day; 
but nothing would make me happier than to be President 
of Harvard College." 

And in later years he publicly declared: "With the am- 
ple opportunities of private life I was content. No tomb- 
stone for me could bear a fairer inscription than this: 
' Here lies one who, without the honors or emoluments of 
■ jniblic station, did something for his feliovv-men.'" It 
was the scholar who spoke, and no doubt he spoke sin- 
cerely. But he found the slavery question in his path; or, 
rather, the slavery cpiestion seized upon him. The advo- 
cate of universal peace, of the eternal reign of justice and 



EULOGY BY CAEL SCHmRZ. 95 

charity, could not fail to see in slavery the embodiment of 
universal war of man against man, of absolute injustice 
and oppression. Little knowing where the first word 
would carry him, he soon found himself in the midst of the 
struggle. 

The idealist found a living question to deal with, which, 
like a flash of lightning, struck into the very depth of his 
soul, and set it on fii'e. The whole ardor of his nature 
broke out in the enthusiasm of the anti-slavery man. In 
a series of glowing addresses and letters he attacked the 
great wrong. He protested against the Mexican war; he 
assailed with powerful strokes the fugitive slave law; he 
attempted to draw the Whig party into a decided anti- 
slavery policy; and when that failed, he broke through his 
party affiliations, and joined the small band of Free Soil- 
ers. He was an abolitionist by nature, but not one of 
those who rejected the Constitution as a covenant with 
slavery. His legal mind found in the Constitution no ex- 
pi'ess recognition of slavery, and he consistently construed 
it as a warrant of freedom. This placed him in the ranks 
of those who were called " political abolitionists." 

He did not think of the sacrifices which this obedience 
to his moral impulses might cost him. For, at that time, 
abolitionism Avas by uo means a fashionable thing. An 
anti-slavery man was then, even in Boston, positively the 
horror of a large portion of polite society. To make anti- 
slavery speeches was looked upon, not only as an incendiary, 
but a vulgar occupation. And that the highly refined 
Sumner, who was so learned and able, who had seen the 
world and mixed with the highest social circles in Europe; 
who knew the classics by heart, and could deliver judg- 



96 BIEMOKIAL OF CUARLES SUMISTER. 

meut on a picture or a statue like a veteran connoisseur; 
who was a favorite with the wealthy and powei-ful, and 
could in his aspirations for an easy and fitting position in 
life count upon their whole infiuenee, if he only would not 
do anything foolish, — that such a man should go among 
the abolitionists, and not only sympathize with them, but 
work with them, and expose himself to the chance of being 
dragged through the streets by vulgar hands with a rope 
round his neck, like AVilliam Lloyd Garrison, — that was 
a thing at which the polite society of that day would re- 
volt, and which no man could undertake without danger 
of being severely dropped. But that was the thing which 
the refined Sumner actually did, probably without giving 
a moment's thought to the possible consequences. 

He went even so far as openly to defy that dictatorship 
which Daniel Webster had for so many years been exer- 
cising over the political mind of Massachusetts, and which 
then was about to exert its power in favor of a compro- 
mise with slavery. 

But times were changing, and only six years after the 
delivery of his first popular address he was elected to the 
Senate of the United States by a combination of Dem- 
ocrats and Free-Soilers. 

Chai-les Sumner entered the Senate on the 1st day of 
December, 1851. He entered as the successor of Daniel 
Webster, who had been apjjointed Secretaiy of State. On 
that same 1st of December Henry Clay spoke his last 
word in the Senate, and then left the chamber, never to 
return. 

A striking and most significant coincidence : Henry Clay 
disappeared from public life; Daniel Webster left the 



EULOGY BY CARL SCIIURZ. 97 

Senate, drawing near his end; Charles Sumner stepped 
upon the scene. The close of one and the setting in 
of another epoch in the history of the American Re- 
public wci-e porti'ayed in the exit and entry of these men. 

Clay and Webster liad appeared in the councils of the 
nation in the early part of this century. The Eepubiic was 
then still in its childhood, in almost every respect still an 
untested exjieriiKent, an unsolved problem. Slowly and 
painfully had it struggled through the first conflicts of 
constitutional theories, and acquired only an uncertain 
degree of national consistency. There were the some- 
what unruly democracies of the States, with their fresh 
revolutionary reminiscences, their instincts of entirely 
independent sovereignty, and their now and then seem- 
ingly divergent interests; and the task of binding them 
firmly together in the bonds of common aspirations, of 
national spirit and the authority of national law, had, 
indeed, fairly progressed, but was far from being entirely 
accomplished. The United States, not yet compacted by 
the means of rapid locomotion which to-day make eveiy 
inhabitant of the land a neighbor of the national cajjital, 
were then still a straggling confederacy; and the mem- 
bers of that confederacy had, since the triumphant issue 
of the Revolution, more common memories of severe trials, 
snflerings, embarrassments, dangers and anxieties together, 
than of cheering successes and of assured prosperity and 
well-being. 

The great i^owers of the Old World, fiercely contending 
among themselves for the mastery, trampled, without 
remorse, upon the neutral rights of the young and feeble 
Republic. A war was impending with one of them, bring- 



98 MEMORIAL OF CIIAKLES SUMNEK. 

ing on disastrous reverses and spreading alarm and dis- 
content over the land. A dark cloud of financial dilli- 
culty hung over the nation. And the danger from abroad 
and embarrassments at home were heightened by a rest- 
less party spirit, which former disagreements had left 
behind them, and which every newly-arising question 
seemed to embitter. The outlook was dark and uncertain. 
It was under such circumstances that Henry Clay lirst, 
and Daniel Webster shortly after him, stepped upon the 
scene, and at once took their station in the foremost rank 
of public men. 

The problems to bo solved by the statesmen of that 
period were of an eminently practical nature. They had 
to establish the position of the young Republic among the 
powers of the earth; to make her rights as a neutral 
respected ; to secure the safety of her maritime interests. 
They had to provide for national defence. They had to 
set the interior household of the Republic in working 
order. 

They had to find remedies for a burdensome public debt 
and a disordered currency. They had to invent and origi- 
nate policies, to bring to light the resources of the land, 
sleej^ing unknown in the virgin soil; to open and make 
accessible to the husbandman the wild acres yet un- 
touched; to protect the frontier settler against the inroads 
of the savage; to call into full activity the agricultural, 
commercial and industrial energies of the people; to de- 
velop and extend the prosperity of the nation so as to 
make even the discontented cease to doubt that the na- 
tional union was, and should be maintained as, a blessing 
to all. 



ETJLOGY BY CARL SCHUEZ. 99 

Thus we find the statesmanship of those tunes busily 
occuiiied with practical detail of foreign policy, national 
defence, financial policy, tariffs, banks, organization of 
governmental departments, land policy, Indian policy, inter- 
nal improvements, settlements of disputes and difficulties 
among the States, contrivances of expediency of all sorts, 
to put the Government firmly upon its feet, and to set and 
keep in orderly motion the working of the political ma- 
chinery, to build up and strengthen and secure the frame- 
Avork in which the mighty developments of the future 
were to take place. 

Such a task, sometimes small in its details, but diffi- 
cult and grand in its comprehensiveness, required that 
creative, organizing, building kind of statesmanship, 
which to large and enlightened views of the aims and 
ends of political organization and of the wants of society 
must add a practical knowledge of details, a skilful hand- 
ling of existing material, a just understanding of causes 
and efiects, the ability to compose distracting conflicts and 
to bring the social forces into fruitful co-operation. 

On this field of action Clay and Webster stood in the 
fr-ont rank of an illustrious array of contemporaries : Clay, 
the originator of measures and policies, with his inventive 
and organizing mind, not rich in profound ideas or in 
knowledge gathered by book study, but learning as he 
went; quick in the perception of existing wants and diffi- 
culties and of the means within reach to satisfy the one 
and overcome the other; and a born captain also, — a com- 
mander of men, who appeared as if riding through the 
struggles of those days mounted on a splendidly capari- 
soned charger, sword in hand, and with waving helmet and 



100 MEMOKTAL OF CHARLES SinvrNTEI!. 

plume, leading the front; — a fiery and truly magnetic soul, 
overawing with his frown, enchanting with his smile, flour- 
ishing the weapon of eloquence like a wizard's wand, 
overwhelming opposition and kindling and fanning the 
flame of enthusiasm; — a marshaller of parties, whose very 
liresenee and voice like a signal blast created and wielded 
organization. 

And by his side Daniel AYebster, with that awful vast- 
ness of brain, a tremendous storehouse of thought and 
knowledge, which gave forth its treasures with ponderous 
majesty of utterance; he not an originator of measures 
and policies, but a mighty advocate, the greatest advocate 
this country ever knew, — a king in the realm of intellect, 
and the solemn embodiment of authority, — a huge Atlas, 
who carried the constitution on his shoulders. He could 
have carried there the whole moral grandeur of the 
nation, had he never compromised his own. 

Such men filled the stage during that period of con- 
struction and conservative national organization, devoting 
the best efforts of their statesmanship, the statesmanship 
of the political mind, to the purpose of raising their coun- 
try to greatness in wealth and power, of making the 
people })i'oud of their common nationality, and of imbed- 
ding the Union in the contentment of prosperity, in 
enlightened patriotism, national law, and constitutional 
pi'inciple. 

And when they drew near their end, they could boast 
of many a grand achievement, not indeed exclusively their 
own, for other powerful minds had their share in the 
work. The United States stood there among the great 
powers of the earth, strong and respected. The Kepublic 



EULOGY BY CARL SCHURZ. 101 

had no foreign foe to fear; its growth in popiihitiou and 
wealth, in jiopular intelligence and progressive civiliza- 
tion, the wonder of the world. There was no visible 
limit to its development; there seemed to be no danger to 
its integrity. 

Bnt among the problems which the statesmen of that 
period had grappled with, there was one which had elnded 
their grasp. Many a conflict of opinion and interest they 
had succeeded in settling, either by positive decision, or 
by judicious composition. But one conflict had stubbornly 
baffled the statesmanship of expedients, for it was more 
than a mere conflict of opinion and interest. It was a 
conflict grounded deep in the moral nature of men — the 
slavery question. 

Many a time had it appeared on the surfixcc during the 
period I have described, threatening to overthrow all that 
had been ingeniously built up, and to break asunder all 
that had been laboriously cemented together. In their 
anxiety to avert every danger threatening the Union, 
they attempted to repress the slavery question by com- 
jjromise, and, apparently, with success, at least for a 
while. 

But however firmly those compromises seemed to stand, 
there was a force of nature at work which, like a restless 
flood, silently but unceasingly and irresistibly washed their 
foundation away, until at last the towering structure top- 
pled down. 

The anti-slavery movement is now one of the great 
chapters of our past history. The passions of the strug- 
gle having been buried in thousands of graves, and the 
victory of Universal Freedom standing as firm and un- 



102 T\rEMOP.IAL OF chai;les StnvrKER. 

questionable as the eternal hills, we may now look back 
upon that history with an impartial eye. It may be hoped 
that even the j^eople of the South, if they do not yet 
appreciate the spirit which created and guided the anti- 
slavery movement, will not much longer misunderstand it. 
Indeed, the}' grievously misunderstood it at the time. 
They looked upon it as the oflfspi'ing of a wanton desire to 
meddle with other people's aifairs, or as the product of 
hj'pocritical selfishness assuming the mask and cant of 
philanthropy, merely to rob the South and to enrich New 
England; or as an insidious contrivance of criminally 
reckless political ambition, striving to grasj) and monopo- 
lize power at the risk of destroying a part of the country 
or even the whole. 

It was, perhaps, not unnatural that those intei-ested in 
slavei-y should have thought so; but from this great erroi- 
ai'ose their fatal miscalculation as to the peculiar strength 
of the anti-slavery cause. 

No idea ever agitated the popular mind to whose origin 
calculating selfishness was more foreign. Even the great 
uj^rising which bi'ought about the "War of Independence 
was less free from selfish motives, for it sprang from 
i-esistance to a tyrannical abuse of the taxing power. Then 
the people rose against that oppression which touched 
their property; the anti-slavery movement originated in 
an impulse purely moral. 

It was the irresistible breaking out of a trouble of con- 
science, — a trouble of conscience which had already dis- 
turbed the men who made the American Republic. It 
found a voice in their anxious admonitions, their gloomy 
prophecies, their scrupulous care to exclude from the Con- 



EULOGY BY CAEL SCHUKZ. 103 

stitution all forms of expression which might have ap- 
peared to sanction the idea of property in man. 

It found a voice in the fierce struggles which resulted 
in the Missouri compromise. It was repressed for a time 
by material interest, by the greed of gain, when the pecu- 
liar product of slave labor became one of the principal 
staples of the country and a mine of wealth. But the 
trouble of conscience raised its voice again, shrill and de- 
fiant as when your own John Quincy Adams stood in the 
halls of Congress, and w'hcn devoted advocates of the 
rights of man began and carried on, in the face of ridicule 
and brutal persecution, an agitation seemingly hopeless. 
It cried out again and again, until at last its tones and 
echoes grew louder than all the noises that were to 
drown it. 

The anti-slavery movement found arrayed against itself 
all the influences, all the agencies, all the arguments which 
ordinarily control the actions of men. 

Commerce said, — Do not disturb slavery, for its prod- 
ucts fill our ships and are one of the principal means of 
our exchanges. Industry said, — Do not disturb slavery, 
for it feeds our machinery and gives us mai-kets. The 
greed of wealth said, — Do not disturb slavery, for it is 
an inexhaustible fountain of riches. Political ambition 
said, — Do not disturb slavery, for it furnishes us combi- 
nations and compromises to keep jjarties alive and to make 
power the price of shrewd management. An anxious 
statesmanship said, — Do not disturb slavery, for you 
might break to pieces the union of these States. 

There never was a more formidable combination of in- 
terests and influences than that which confronted the anti- 



104 MEMOrJAr> OF CHAKLES SU]MXER. 

slavery movement in its earlier stages. And what was its 
answer? "Whether all you say be true or Iklse, it matters 
not, but slavery is wrong." 

Slavery is wrong! That one word was enough. It 
stood there like a huge rock in the sea, shivering to spi-ay 
the waves dashing upon it. Interest, greed, argument, 
vituperation, calumny, ridicule, persecution, patriotic ap- 
peal, — it was all in vain. Amidst all the storm and assault 
that one Avord stood there unmoved, intact and impreg- 
nable : Slavery is wi'ong. 

Such was the vital spirit of the anti-slavery movement 
in its early development. Such a spii'it alone could in- 
spire that religious devotion which gave to the believer all 
the stubborn energy of fanaticism ; it alone could kindle 
that deep enthusiasm which made men willing to risk and 
sacrifice everything for a great cause ; it alone could keep 
alive that unconquerable faith in the certainty of ultimate 
success which boldly attempted to overcome seeming 
impossibilities. 

It was indeed a great spirit, as, against difficulties which 
threw pusillanimity into despair, it painfully struggled into 
light, often bafHed and as often pressing forward with 
devotion always fresh ; nourished by nothing but a prolbnnd 
sense of right; encouraged by nothing but the cheering 
sym])athy of liberty-loving mankind the world over, and 
by the hope that some day the conscience of the American 
people would be quickened by a full understanding of the 
dangers Avhich the existence of the great wrong would 
bring upon the Republic. I^o scramble for the spoils of 
office then, no expectation of a speedy conquest of power, 
— nothing but that conviction, that enthusiasm, that faith 



EULOGY CY OAliL SCHUKZ. 105 

in the breasts of a small band of men, and the prospect of 
new uncertain struggles and trials. 

At the time when Mr. Sumner entered the Senate, the 
hope of final victory ajjj^eared as distant as ever; but it 
only appeared so. The statesmen of the past period had 
just succeeded in building up that compromise which ad- 
mitted California as a free State, and imposed upon the 
Republic the fugitive slave law. That compromise, like 
all its predecessors, was considered and called a final set- 
tlement. The two great jDolitical parties accepted it as 
such. In whatever they might difier, as to this they 
solemnly proclaimed their agreement. Fidelity to it was 
looted upon as a test of true patriotism, and as a qualifi- 
cation necessary for the possession of political power. 
Opposition to it was denounced as factious, unpatriotic, 
revolntionary demagogism, little short of treason. An 
overwhelming majority of the American people acquiesced 
in it. Material interest looked upon it with satisfaction, 
as a promise of reijose; timid and sanguine patriots 
greeted it as a new bond of luiion; politicians hailed it as 
an assurance that the fight for the public plunder might 
be carried on without the disturbing intrusion of a moral 
principle in politics. But, deep down, men's conscience 
like a volcanic fire was restless, ready for a new outbreak 
as soon as the thin crust of compromise should ci-ack. And 
just then the day was fast approaching when the moral 
idea, which so far had only broken out sporadically, and 
moved small numbers of men to open action, should receive 
a reinforcement strong enough to transform a forlorn hope 
into an army of irresistible sti'ength. One of those eternal 
laws which govern the development of human affiiirs 



lOG MEMORIAL OF CHARLES SUMNER. 

asserted itself, — tlie law that a great wrong, Avhich has been 
maintained in defiance of the moral sense of mankind, nnist 
finally, by the very means and measnres necessary for its 
sustenance, render itself so insnpportable as to insure its 
downfall and destruction. 

So it was with slavery. I candidly acquit the American 
slave-power of Avilful and wanton aggression upon the 
liberties and general interests of the American people. 
If slaveiy was to be kept alive at all, its supporters could 
not act otherwise than they did. 

Slaver}' could not live and thrive in an atmosphere of 
free inquiry and untrammelled discussion. Thei-efore free 
inquiry and discussion touching slavery had to be sup- 
pressed. 

Slavery could not be secure, if slaves, escaping merely 
across a State line, thei-eby escaped the grasp of their 
mastei's. Hence an effective fugitive slave law was im- 
peratively demanded. 

Slavery could not protect its interests in the Union 
unless its power balanced that of the free States in the 
national councils. Thei'cfore by colonization or conquest 
the number of slave States had to be augmented. Hence 
the annexation of Texas, the Mexican wai', and intrigues 
for the acquisition of Cuba. 

Slavery could not maintain the equilibrium of power, if 
it permitted itself to be excluded from the national Terri- 
tories. Ilence the breaking down of the Missouri Com- 
promise and the usurpation in Kansas. 

Thus slavery was pushed on and on by the inexorable 
logic of its existence; the slave masters were only the 
slaves of the necessities of slavery, and all their seeming 



KTTLOGY BY CAKL SCHUIIZ. 107 

exactions and usurpations were merely a struggle for its 
life. 

Many of their demands had been satisiied, on the part 
of the North, by submission or compromise. The North- 
ern people, although with reluctant conscience, had ac- 
quiesced in the contiivances of politicians, for the sake 
of peace. But when the slave-i>ower went so far as to 
demand for slaveiy the great domain of the nation which 
had been held sacred to freedom forever, then the people 
of the North suddenly luiderstood that the necessities of 
slavery demanded what they could not yield. Then the 
conscience of the masses was relieved of the doubts and 
fears which had held it so long in check; their moral im- 
pulses were quickened by practical perceptions; the moral 
idea became a practical force, and the final sti'uggle began. 
It was made inevitable by the necessities of slavery; it 
was indeed an irrepressible conflict. 

These things were impending when Henry Clay and 
Daniel Webster, the architects of the last compromise, 
left the Senate. Had they, with all their far-seeing 
statesmanship, never understood this logic of things? 
When they made their compromises, did they only desire 
to postpone the final struggle, until they should be gone, 
so that they might not witness the terrible concussion? 
Or had their gi-eat and manifold achievements with the 
statesmanship of organization and expediency so deluded 
their minds, that they really hoped a compromise which 
only ignored, but did not settle, the great moral question, 
could furnish an enduring basis for future developments ? 
One thing they and their contemporaries had indeed 
accomplished ; under their care the Kcpublic had grown 



108 JIEMOItlAI. OF CHARLES SUlvrNER. 

SO gi-eat and strong, its vitality had Ijecome so tough, 
that it could endure the final struggle without falling to 
pieces under its shocks. 

Wliatever their errors, their delusions, and, perhaps, 
their misgivings may have been, this they had aecom- 
l>lished ; and then they left the last compromise tottering 
behind them, and turned theii' faces to the wall and died. 

And with them stepped into the background the states- 
manship of organization, expedients and compromises ; 
and to the front came, ready for action, the moral idea 
which was to fight out the great conflict, and to open a 
new ejioch of American histoiy. 

That was the historic significance of the remarkable 
scene which shoAved us Henry Clay walking out of the 
Senate Chamber never to return, when Charles Sumner 
sat down there as the successor of Daniel Webster. 

No man could, in his whole being, have more strikmgly 
portrayed that contrast. When Charles Smnner had Ix-en 
elected to the Senate, Theodore Parker said to hmi, in a 
letter of congratulation, "You told me once that you 
were in morals, not in politics. Now I hope you will 
show that you are still in morals, although in politics. I 
hope you will be the senator with a conscience." That 
hope was gratified. He always remained in morals while 
in polities. He never was anything else but the senator 
with a conscience. Charles Sumner entei'ed the Senate 
not as a mere advocate, but as the very embodiment of 
the moral idea. From this fountam flowed his highest 
aspirations. There had been great anti-slavery men in 
the Senate before him ; they were there with him, men 
like Seward and Chase. But they had been trained in a 



EULOGY BY CARL SCHUEZ. 109 

different school. Their minds had ranged over other 
poUtical fields. They understood politics. He did not. 
He knew but one political object, — to combat and over- 
throw the great wi'ong of slavery ; to serve the ideal of 
the liberty and equality of men ; and to establish the 
universal reign of "jieace, justice and charity." He 
brought to the Senate a studious mmd, vast learning, 
great legal attainments, a powerful eloquence, a strong 
and ardent nature ; and all this he vowed to one service. 
With all this he was not a mere expounder of a policy ; 
he was a worshipi:)er, sincere and devout, at the shrine of 
his ideal. In no public man had the moral idea of the 
anti-slavery movement more overruling strength. He 
made everything yield to it. He did not possess it; it 
possessed him. That was the secret of his peculiar 
power. 

He introduced himself into the debates of the Senate, 
the slavery question having been silenced forever, as poli- 
ticians then thought, by several speeches on other sub- 
jects, — the recej^tion of Kossuth, the Land Policy, Ocean 
Postage; but they were not remarkable, and attracted but 
little attention. 

At last he availed himself of an appropriation bill to 
attack the fugitive slave law, and at once a spuit broke 
forth in that fii-st word on the great question which 
startled ever}^ listener. 

Thus he opened the argument : — 

"Painfully convinced of the unutterable wrong and 
woe of slavery, — profoundly believing that according to 
the true sjiuit of the Constitution and the sentiments of 
the fathers, it can find no place under our national gov- 



110 MEMOIUAL OF CIIAllLES SUMXER. 

ernment, — I coiikl not allow this session to reach its close 
"without making- or seizing an opportunity to declare my- 
self ojienly against the usurpation, injustice, and cruelty 
of the late intolerant enactment for the recovery of fugitive 
slaves." 

Then this significant declaration: — 

" Wliatevei' I am or may be, I I'reely otter to this cause. 
I have never been a politician. The slave of principles, 
I call no party master. By sentuncnt, education, and 
conviction, a friend of Human Rights in their utmost 
exj^ansion, I have ever most sincerely embraced the Demo- 
cratic idea — not, indeed, as represented or professed by 
any party, but according to its real significance, as trans- 
figured in the Declaration of Independence, and in the 
injunctions of Christianity. In this idea I see no narrow 
advantage merely for individuals or classes, but the sov- 
ereignty of the people, and the greatest hapjiiness of all 
secured by equal laws." 

A vast array of historical research and of legal argu- 
ment was then called up to prove the sectionalism of 
slavery, the nationalism of freedom, and the unconstitu- 
tionality of the fugitive slave act, followed by this bold 
declaration : " By the Supreme Law, which commands me 
to do no injustice, by the comprehensive Christian Law of 
Brotherhood, by the Constitution I have sworn to support, 
I am bound to disobey this law." And the speech closed 
with this solemn quotation : "Beware of the groans of 
wounded souls, since the inward sore will at length break 
out. Oppress not to the utmost a single heart ; for a soli- 
tary sigh has powei' to overturn a whole world." 

The amendment to the appropriation bill moved by Mi'. 



EULOGY BY CAKL SCHURZ. Ill 

Sumner received only four votes of fifty-one. But every 
hearer had been struck by the words spoken as something 
different from the tone of other anti-slavery speeches de- 
livered in those halls. Southern Senators, startled at the 
pecuharity of the speech, called it, in reply, "the most 
extraordinary language they had ever listened to." Mr, 
Chase, supporting Sumner in debate, spoke of it, " as 
marking a new era in American history, when the anti- 
slavery idea ceased to stand on the defensive and was 
boldly advancing to the attack." 

Indeed, it had that significance. There stood up in the 
Senate a man who was no politician ; but who, on the 
highest field of politics, with a concentrated intensity of 
feeling and purpose never before witnessed there, gave 
expression to a moral impulse, which, although sleeping 
perhaps for a time, certainly existed in the popular con- 
science, and which, once become a political force, could 
not fail to produce a great revolution. 

Charles Sumner possessed all the instincts, the courage, 
the firmness and the faith of the devotee of a great idea. 
In the Senate he was a member of a feeble minority, so 
feeble, indeed, as to be to the ruling power a mere subject 
of derision ; and for the first three years of his service 
without organized popular support. The slaveholders 
had been accustomed to put the metal of their northern 
opponents to a variety of tests. Many a hot anti-slavery 
zeal had cooled under the social blandishments with which 
the South knew so well how to impregnate the atmosphere 
of the national capital, and many a high courage had given 
way before the haughty assumption and fierce menace of 
Southern men in Congress. Mr. Sumner had to pass that 



112 MKMORIAL OF CIIAKLES SUMNEK. 

ordeal. He was at first petted and flattered by Southern 
society, but, fond as he was of the charms of social inter- 
course, and accessible to demonstrative appreciation, no 
blandishments could touch his convictions of duty. 

And when the advocates of slavery turned upon hira 
with anger and menace, he hurled at them with prouder 
defiance his answer, repeating itself in endless variations: 
" You must yield, for you are wi'ong." 

The slave power had so frequently succeeded in making 
the North yield to its demands, even after the most for- 
midable demonstrations of reluctance, that it had become 
a serious question whether there existed any such thing as 
]^orthcrn firmness. But it did exist, and in Charles Sum- 
ner it had developed its severest political type. The 
stronger the assault, the higher rose in him tlie power of 
resistance. In him lived that spii-it which not only would 
not yield, but would turn upon the assailant. The Southei'u 
force, which believed itself irresistible, found itself striking 
against a body which was immovable. To think of yield- 
ing to any demand of slavery, of making a compromise 
with it, in however tempting a form, was, to his nature, an 
absolute impossibility. 

Mr. Sumner's courage was of a peculiar kind. lie at- 
tacked the slave power in the most unsparing manner, 
when its supporters were most violent in resenting opposi- 
tion, and when that violence was always apt to proceed 
from words to blows. One day, while Sumner was deliv- 
ering one of his severest speeches, Stephen A. Douglass, 
walking up and down behind the President's chair in the 
old Scnate-chamljer, and listening to him, remarked to a 
friend: " Do you hear that man? lie may be a fool, but I 



EULOGY BY CAKL SCHIIKZ. 113 

toll you that man has pluck. I wonder whether he knows 
himself Avliat he is doing. I am not sure Avhether I 
should have the courage to say those things to the men 
who are scowling around him." 

Of all men in the Senate-chamber, Sumner was proba- 
bly least aware that the thing he did required pluck. He 
simply did what he felt it his duty to his cause to do. It 
was to him a matter of course. He was like a soldier who, 
when he has to march upon the enemy's batteries, does 
not say to himself: " I^ow I am going to perform an act of 
heroism," but who simply obeys an impulse of duty, and 
mai'ches forward without thinking of the bullets that fly 
around his head. A thought of the boldness of what he 
has done may then occur to him afterwards, when he is 
told of it. This was one of the striking peculiarities of 
Mr. Sumner's character, as all those know who knew him 
well. 

Neither was he conscious of the stinging force of the 
language he frequently employed. He simply uttered, 
what he felt to be true, in language fitting the strength of 
his convictions. The indignation of his moral sense at 
what he felt to be wrong was so deep and sincere that he 
thought everybody must find the extreme severity of his 
expressions as natural as they came to his own mind. 
And he was not unfrequently surprised, greatly surprised, 
when others found his language ofiensive. 

As he possessed the firmness and courage, so he pos- 
sessed the faith of the devotee. From the beginning, and 
through all the vicissitudes of the anti-slavery movement, 
his heart was profoundly assured that his generation 
would see slavei'y entirely extinguished. 



114 MEMORIAL OF CHARLES SUMXER. 

While; travelling in France to restore his lieaitli, 
after having been beaten down on the floor of the Senate, 
he visited Alexis de Tocqueville, the celebrated author oC 
"Democracy in xlmei-ica." Tocqueville expressed his 
anxiety about the issue of the anti-slavery movement, 
which tlien liad suffered defeat by the election of Buchanan. 
"There can be no doubt about the result," said Sumner. 
"Slavery will soon succumb and disappear." " Disappear! 
in what way, and how soon?" asked Tocqueville. "In 
what manner I cannot say," replied Sumner. " How soon I 
cannot say. But it will be soon; I feel it; I know it. It 
cannot be otherwise." That was all the reason he gave. 
"Mr. Sumner is a remarkable man," said de Tocqueville 
afterwards to a friend of mine. " He says that slavery 
will soon entirely disappear in the United States. He does 
not know how, he does not know when, but he feels it, he 
is perfectly sure of it. The man speaks like a prophet." 
And so it was. 

What appcai'cd a perplexing puzzle to other men's 
minds was perfectly clear tohiin. His method of reason- 
ing was simple; it was the reasoning of religious faith. 
Slavery is wrong, — therefore it must and will perish; free- 
dom is right, — thei'efore it must and will prevail. And by 
no power of resistance, by no difficulty, by no disappoint- 
ment, by no defeat, could that faith be shaken. For his 
cause, so great and just, he thought nothing impossible, 
everything certain. And he was unable to understand 
how others could fail to share his faith. 

In one sense he was no party leader. He possessed 
none of tlie instinct or experience of the politician, nor 
that sagacity of mind which appreciates and measures the 



EULOGY BY CAKL SCIIURZ. 115 

importance of chaiig-iiig circumstances, or the possibilities 
and opportunities of the clay. He lacked, entirely, the 
genius of organization. He never understood, nor did he 
value, the art of strengthening his following by timely 
concession, or prudent reticence, or advantageous combi- 
nation and alliance. He knew nothing of management 
and party manoeuvre. Indeed, not unfrequently he 
alarmed many devoted friends of his cause by bold decla- 
rations, foi" which, they thought, the public mind was not 
prepared, and by the unreserved avowal and straightfor- 
ward advocacy of ultimate objects, which, they thought, 
might safely be left to the natural development of events. 
He yviis not seldom accused of doing things calculated to 
frighten the people and to disorganize the anti-slavery 
forces. 

Such was his unequivocal declaration in his first great 
anti-slavery speech in the Senate, that he held himself 
bound by every conviction of jiistice, right and duty, to 
disobey the fugitive slave law, and his ringing answer to 
the question put by Senator Butler of South Carolina, 
whether, without the fugitive slave law, he would, under 
the Constitntion, consider it his duty to aid the surrender 
of fugitive slaves, " Is thy servant a dog, that he should 
do this thing? " 

Such was his speech on the "Barbarism of Slavery," 
delivered on a bill to admit Kansas immediately under a 
free State Constitution; a speech so unsparing and vehe- 
ment in the denunciation of slaveiy in all its political, 
moral and social aspects, and so direct in its prediction of 
the complete annihilation of slavery, that it was said such 
a speech would scarcely aid the admission of Kansas. 



IIG MKMORIAI- OV rilAIU.KS STn\TXEn. 

Such w;is Ills iiMhi'iidin^- niul open i-csistance to niiy 
pliin ol' coinproinise calciilnted to i)i'c'serve slavery, wIkmi 
upon Mr. Lincoln's election, the Kehellion Hrst raised its 
licad, and a lari^e manix'r of Nortlici-n [)coj)!e, even anti- 
slavery men, frightened by the ihrealening i)rospect of 
civil wai', cast blindly about for a i)lan of adjustment, 
wliile I't'ally no adjustuient was possible. 

Such was, early in tlie war, and during its most doubt- 
ful houi-s, his declaration, laid before the Senate in a series 
of resolutions, that the States in rebellion had destroyed 
themselves as such by the very act of rebellion; that 
slavery, as a creation of State law, had perished with the 
States, and that genera! emanci[)ation nmst immediately 
follow, — thus putting the ])rogrammc of emancii)atlon 
boldly in the foreground, at a time when many thought 
that (he ciy of union alone, union with or without slavery, 
could hold together the Union forces. 

Such was his declaration, demanding negro suffrage even 
before! the close of the wai', while the public o])inion at 
the JS'orth, whose aid the government needed, still lecoik'd 
I'rom such a measure. 

'^riuis la- was apt to go rough-shod over the considera- 
tions of management, deemed important by his co-workers. 
I believe; he never consulted with his friends around him, 
before doing those things, and when they afterwai-ds 
remonstrated with him, he ingenuously asked: " Is it not 
right and true, what I have said? And if it is right and 
true, must I not say it'r*" 

And yet, although he had no organizing mind, and 
despised management, he was a leader. lie was a leader, 
as the embodiment of the moral idea, with all its uneom- 



EULOGY BY CAUL SCIIXTRZ. 117 

promising firmness, its unflag-ging' faith, its daring devo- 
tion. And in this sense lie could be a leader only 
because he was no politician. He forced others to follow, 
because he was himself impi-acticablc. Simply obeying 
his moral impulse, he dared to say things which in the 
highest legislative body of the Rejjuljlic nobody else would 
say; and he proved that they could be said, and yet the 
world would move on. With his wealth of learning and 
his legal ability, he furnished an arsenal of arguments, 
convincing more timid sonls that what he said could be 
sustained in repeating. And presently the politicians felt 
encom-aged to follow in the direction where the idealist 
had driven a stake ahead, l^ay, ho forced them to follow, 
for they knew that the idealist, whom they could not 
venture to disown, would not fall back at their bidding. 
Such was his leadei'ship in the struggle with slavery. 

!Nor was that leadership interrupted when, on the 22d 
of May, 1856, Preston Brooks of South Carolina, mad- 
dened by an arraignment of his State and its Senator, 
came upon Charles Sumner in the Senate, struck him 
down with heavy blows and left him on the ground bleed- 
ing and insensible. For three years Sumner's voice was 
not heai'd, but his blood mai'kcd the vantage ground from 
which his party could not recede; and his senatorial chair, 
kept empty for him by the noble peo])le of Massachusetts, 
stood there in most eloquent silence, confirming, sealing, 
inflaming all he had said with terrible illustration, — a guide- 
post to the onward march of fi'ccdom. 

When, in 1861, the Republican party had taken the reins 
of government in hand, his peculiar leadership entered 
upon a new f eld of action. No sooner was the victory of the 



118 MEMOltlAL OV CHARLES SUMlSrER. 

aiiti-slavery cause in the election ascertained, tlian the Re- 
belhon I'aisecl its head. South Carolina opened the seces- 
sion movement. The poi'tentous shadow of an approaching 
civil war spread over the land. A tremor fluttered through 
the hearts even of strong men in the I^orth, — a vague 
fear such as is pi-oduccd by the fiivst rumbling of an eartli- 
quake. Could not a bloody conflict be averted? Afresh 
clamor for compromise arose. Even Republicans in Con- 
gress began to waver. The proposed compromise in- 
volved new and express constitutional recognitions of the 
existence and i-ights of slavery, and guarantees against 
interference with it by constitutional amendment or na- 
tional law. The pressure from the country, even from 
Massachusetts, in f;xvor of the scheme, was extraordinary, 
but a majority of the anti-slavery men in the Senate, in 
their front Mr. Sumnei-, stood firm, feeling that a com- 
promise, giving express constitutional sanction and an 
indefinite lease of life to slavery, Avould be a surrender, 
and knowing, also, that even by the ofici- of such a sur- 
render, secession and civil war would still be insisted on 
by the Southern leaders. The history of those days, as we 
now know it, confirms the accui-acy of that judgment. 
The war was inevitable. Thus the anti-slavery cause 
escaped a useless humiliation, and retained intact its moral 
force for future action. 

But now the time had come when the anti-slavei-y 
movement, no longer a mere opposition to the demands of 
the slave power, was to proceed to positive action. The 
war had scarcely commenced in earnest, when Mi-. Sum- 
ner urged general emancipation. Onl}' the great ideal 
object of the liberty of all men could give sanction to a 



EULOUY BY CARL SCHLTRZ. 119 

war in the eyes of the devotee of universal peace. To 
tlie end of stamping upon the war the character of a war 
of emancipation all his energies were bent. His unre- 
served and emphatic utterances ahirmed the politicians. 
Our armies suffered disaster upon disaster in the field. 
The managing mind insisted that care must be taken, by 
nourishing the popular enthusiasm for the integrity of the 
Union, — the strictly national idea alone, — to unite all 
the social and political elements of the [N^orth for the 
struggle; and that so bold a measure as immediate emanci- 
pation might reanimate old dissensions, and put hearty 
co-operation in jeojjardy. 

But Mr. Sumner's convictions could not be repressed. 
In a bold decree of universal liberty he saw only a 
new source of inspiration and strength. 'Nor was his 
imijulsive instinct unsupported by good reason. The 
distraction produced in the I^orth by an emancipation 
measure could only be of short duration. The moral 
spu'it was cei-tain, ultimately, to gain the upper hand. 

But in another direction a bold and unequivocal anti- 
slavery policy could not fail to produce most salutary 
effects. One of the dangers threatening us was foreign 
interference. No European powers gave us their expressed 
sympathy excej)t Germany and Russia. The governing 
classes of England, with conspicuous mdividual excep- 
tions, always gi'atefully to be remembered, were ill-dis- 
posed towards the Union cause. The permanent disruption 
of the EejDublic was loudly predicted, as if it were 
desu'ed, and intervention — an intervention which could 
be only in favor of the South — was openly spoken of. 
The Empcior of the French, who availed himself of our 



120 IMEMORIAL OF ClIAKLES SUMXElt. 

c'inl)ai'ra:ssnieiits to execute his ambitious designs in 
Mexico, was auiiiiatcd by sentiments no less hostile. It 
appeared as if only a plausible opportunity had been 
wanting, to bring foreign intervention upon our heads. 
A tlu'catening spirit, disarmed only by timely prudence, 
had manifested itself in the Trent case. It seemed 
doulitful whether the most skilful diplomacy, unaided 
by a stronger force, Avould be able to avei't the danger. 

But the greatest strength of the anti-slavery cause had 
always been in the conscience of manhind. There was 
our natural ally. The cause of slavery as such could 
have no open sympathy among the nations of Europe. 
It stood condemned by the moral sentiment of the 
civilized world. IIow coidd any European govei-nment, 
in the fiice of that universal sentiment, undertake openly 
to interfere against a power waging war against slavery? 
Surely, that could not be thought of. 

But had the goveiiunent of the United States distinctly 
pi'ofessed that it was waging war against slavery, and for 
freedom? Had it not been officially declared that the 
war for the Union would not alter the condition of a 
single human being in America? Why then not arrest 
the useless eifusion of blood; why not, by intervention, 
stop a destructive war, in which, confessedly^, slavery and 
freedom were not at stake? Such were tlie arguments of 
our enemies in Europe; and they were not without color. 

It was obvious that notliing but a measure iinj)ressing 
beyond dispute upon our war a decided anti-slavery chai- 
acter, making it in profession what it was inevitably des- 
tined to be in fact, a war of emancipation, — coukl enlist 
on our side the enlightened public opinion of the Old 



EULOGY BY CARL SCHURZ. 121 

World SO strongly as to restrain the hostile spirit of 
foreign governments. No European government could 
well venture to interfere against those who had convinced 
the world that they were fighting to give freedom to the 
slaves of North America. 

Thus the moral instinct did not err. The emancipation 
policy was not only the policy of pi-inciple, but also the 
policy of safety. Mr. Sumner urged it with impetuous 
and unflagging zeal. In the Senate he found but little 
encouragement. The resolutions he introduced in Febru- 
ary, 1862, declaring State suicide as the consequence of 
Rebellion, and the extinction of slavery in the insurrec- 
tionary States as the consequence of State suicide, were 
looked upon as an ill-timed and hazardous demonstration, 
disturbing all ideas of management. 

To the President, then, he devoted his efforts. Nothing 
could be more interesting, nay, touching, than the peculiar 
relations that sprung up between Abraham Lincoln and 
Charles Sumner. No two men could be more alike as to 
their moral impulses and ultimate aims; no two men more 
unlike in their methods of reasoning and their judgment 
of means. 

Abraham Lincoln was a true child of the people. There 
was in his heart an inexhaustible fountain of tenderness, 
and from it sprung that longing to be true, just and mer- 
ciful to all, which made the peojjle love him. In the deep, 
large humanity of his soul had grown his moral and polit- 
ical principles, to which he clung with the fidelity of an 
honest nature, and which he defended with the strength 
of a vigorous mind. 

But he had not grown great in any high school of 



122 ^MEMORIAL OF CHAKLES SUMISTER. 

statesnianshij). He had, from the humljle«t beginnings, 
slowly and laboriously worked himself up, or rather he 
had gradually risen up without being aware of it, and sud- 
denly he found himself in the foremost rank of the distin- 
guished men of the land. In his youth and early manhood 
he had achieved no striking successes that might have 
imparted to him that overweening self-appreciation which 
so frequently leads self-made men to overestimate their 
faculties, and to iguore the limits of their strength. He 
Avas not a learned man, but he had learned and meditated 
cnongh to feel how much there Avas still for him to 
learn. His marvellous success in his I'iper years left 
intact the inborn modesty of his nature. He was abso- 
lutely without pretension. His simplicity, which by its 
genuineness extorted respect and aflection, was wonder- 
fully persuasive, and sometimes deeply pathetic and 
strikingly brilliant. 

His natural gifts wei-e great; he possessed a clear and 
penetrating mind, but in forming his opinions on subjects 
of importance, he was so careful, conscientious and diffi- 
dent, that he would always hear and probe what opponents 
had to say, before he became firmly satisfied of the just- 
ness of his own conchisions, — not as if he had been easily 
controlled and led by other men, for he had a will of his 
own; — but his mental operations were slow and hesitat- 
ing, and inapt to conceive quick resolutions. He lacked 
self-reliance. Nobody felt more than he the awful weight 
of his responsibilities. He was not one of those bold re- 
formers who will defy the opposition of the world and un- 
dertake to impose their opinions and will upon a reluctant 
iigc. AVith careful consideration of the possibilities of 



EULOGY BY CARL SCIIURZ. 123 

the hour he advanced slowly, but when he had so ad- 
vanced, he planted his foot with firmness, and no power 
was strong enough to force him to a backward step. And 
eveiy day of great I'esponsibility enlarged the horizon of 
his mind, and ever}' day he grasped the helm of atfairs 
with a steadier hand. 

It was to such a man that Sumner, during the most 
doubtful days at the beginning of the war, addressed his 
appeals for immediate emancipation, — appeals impetuous 
and imi^atient as they could sjiring only from his ardent 
and overruling convictions. 

The President at first passively resisted the vehement 
counsel of the Senator, but he bade the counsellor wel- 
come. It was Mr. Lincoln's constant endeavor to sui- 
round himself with the best and ablest men of the country. 
Not only did the first names of the Republican party ap- 
pear in his cabinet, but every able man in Congress was 
always invited as an adviser, whether his views agreed 
with those of the President or not. But Mr. Sumner he 
treated as a favorite counsellor, almost like a Minister of 
State, outside of the cabinet. 

There were statesmen arouud the President who were 
also politicians, understanding the art of management. 
Mr. Lincoln appreciated the value of their advice as to 
what Avas prudent and practicable. But he knew also 
how to discriminate. In Mr. Sumner he saw a counsellor 
who was no politician, but who stood before him as the 
true representative of the moral earnestness, of the 
great insiiirations of their coimnon cause. From him he 
heard what was right, and necessary, and inevitable. B}' 
the former he was told what, in their opinion, could pru- 



124 MEMORIAL OF CHARLES SUIVIXER. 

dent]}^ and safely be done. Having heard them both, 
Abraham Lincoln connselled with himself, and formed his 
resolution. Thus Mr. Lincoln, while scarcely ever fully 
and speedily following Sumner's advice, never ceased to 
ask for it, for he knew its significance. And Sumner, 
while almost always dissatisfied with Lincoln's cautious 
hesitation, never grew weary in giving his advice, for he 
never distrusted Lincoln's fidelity. Always agreed as to 
the ultimate end, they almost always differed as to times 
and means ; but, while differing, they fii-mly trusted, for 
they imderstood one another. 

And thus then- mutual respect grew into an affectionate 
friendship, which no clash of disagreeing opinions could 
break. Sumner loved to tell his friends, after Lincoln's 
death, — and I heard him relate it often, never without an 
expression of tenderness, — how at one time those who 
disliked and feared his intimacy with the President, and 
desired to see it disrupted, thought it was irreparably 
broken. It was at the close of Lincoln's first administra- 
tion, in 18(35, when the President had proposed certain 
measures of reconstruction, touching the State of 
Louisiana. 

The end of the session of Congress was near at hand, 
and the success of the bill depended on a vote of the 
Senate before the hour of adjournment on the 4th of March. 
Mr. Lincoln had the measure very much at heart. But 
.'rumner opposed it, because it did not contain sufBcient 
guarantees for the rights of the colored people, and by a 
parliamentary manoeuvre, simply consuming time until the 
adjournment came, he with two or three other Senators suc- 
ceeded in defeating it. Lincoln was reported to be deeply 



EULOGY BY CARL SCIIURZ. 125 

chagrined at Sumner's action, and the newspapers ah-eady 
announced tliat the breach between Lineohi and Sumner 
was complete, and could not be healed. But those who 
said so did not know the men. On the night of the Gth 
of March, two days after Lincoln's second inaugu- 
ration, the customary inaugui-ation ball was to take place. 
Sumner did not tliink of attending it. But towards 
evening he received a card from the President, which 
read thus: "Dear Mr, Sumnei', unless you send me 
word to the contrary, I shall this evening call with my 
carriage at your house, to take you with me to the 
inauguration ball. Sincerely youi-s, Abhaham Lincoln." 
Mr. Sumner, deeply touched, at once made up his mind 
to go to an inauguration ball foi- the first time. Soon the 
carriage arrived, the President invited Sumner to take a 
seat in it with him, and Sumner found there Mrs. Lincoln 
and Mr. Colfax, the Speaker of the House of Representa- 
tives. Arrived at the ball-room, the President asked Mr. 
Sumner to offer his arm to Mrs. Lincoln ; and the astonished 
spectators, who had been made to believe that the breach 
between Lincoln and Sumner was irreparable, beheld the 
President's wife on the arm of the Senator, and the Senator, 
on that occasion of State, invited to take the seat of honor 
by the President's side. Not a word passed between them 
about their disagreement. 

The world became convinced that such a friendship 
between such men could not be broken by a mere honest 
difference of opinion. Abraham Lincoln, a man of sincere 
and profound convictions himself, esteemed and honored 
sincere and profound convictions in others. It was thus 
that Abraliam Lincoln composed his quarrels with his 



126 MEMORIAL OF CIIAKLES SU]VI?rEl'v. 

friends, and at his bedside, when he died, there was no 
mourner more deejily afflicted than Charles Sumner. 

Let me return to the year 18G2. Long, incessant and 
arduous was Sumner's labor for emancipation. At last the 
great Pi'oclamation, which sealed the fate of slavery, 
came, and no man had done more to bring it forth than he. 

Still, Charles Sumner thought his work far fi'om accom- 
jilished. During the three years of war that followed, so 
full of vicissitudes, alarms and anxieties, he stood in the 
Senate and in the President's closet as the ever-watchful 
sentinel of freedom and equal rights. No occasion eluded 
his grasp to push on the destruction of slavery, not only 
by sweeping decrees, but in detail, by pursuing it, as with 
a probing-iron, into every nook and corner of its exist- 
ence. It was his sleepless care that every blow struck at 
the Rebellion should surely and heavily tell against 
slavery, and that eveiy drop of American blood that was 
shed should surely be consecrated to human freedom. lie 
could not rest until assurance was made doubl}" sm-e, and 
I doubt whether our legislative history shows an example 
of equal watchfulness, fidelity and devotion to a great ob- 
ject. Such was the character of Mr. Sumner's legislative 
activity during the war. 

As the Kebellion succumbed, new ])roblenis arose. To 
set upon their feet again States disorganized by insun-ec- 
tion and civil war ; to remodel a society which had been 
lifted out of its ancient hinges by the sudden change of 
its system of labor ; to protect the emancijjatcd slaves 
against the old pretension of absolute control on the part 
of their foi-mei- masters ; to guard society against the 
possible transgressions of a large multitude long held in 



EULOGY BY CAUL SCIIURZ. 127 

slavery and ignorance and now suddenly set free ; so to 
lodge i)olitical power in this inflammable state of things 
as to jirevent violent reactions and hostile collisions; to 
lead social forces so discordant into orderly and fruitful 
co-operation, and to infuse into communities, but recently 
rent by the most violent passions, a new spii'it of loyal 
attachment to a common nationality, — this Avas certainly 
one of the most perplexing tasks ever imposed upon the 
statesmanship of any time and any country. 

But to Ml-. Sumner's mind the problem of reconstruction 
did not appear i^erplexing at all. Believing, as he always 
did, that the Democratic idea, as he found it defined in the 
Declaration of Independence, "Human rights in theii* ut- 
most expansion," contained an ultimately certain solution 
of all difficulties, he saw the principal aim to be reached by 
any reconstruction policy, in the investment of the eman- 
cipated slaves with all the rights and privileges of Amer- 
ican citizenship. The complexity of the problem, the 
hazai'dous character of the expei'iment, never troubled him. 
And as, early in the war, he had for himself laid down 
the theory that, by the very act of rebellion, the insurrec- 
tionary States had destroyed themselves as such, so he 
argued now, with assured consistency, that those States 
had relapsed into a territorial condition; that the national 
government had to fill the void by creations of its own, 
and that in doing so the establishment of universal suf- 
frage there was an unavoidable necessity. Thus he 
marched forward to the realization of his ideal, on the 
sti-aightest line, and with the firmness of profound con- 
viction. 

In the discussions which followed, he had the advantage 



128 >rEMORIAL OF CHAKLES SUMNEU. 

of a man who knows exactly what he wants, and who is 
impertui-bably, religiously convinced that he is right. But 
his constitutional theory, as well as the measures he pro- 
posed, foimd little favor in Congress. The public mind 
struggled long against the results he had pointed out as 
inevitable. The whole power of President Johnson's 
administration was employed to lead the development of 
things in another direction. But through all the vacilla- 
tions of public opinion, through all the perplexities in 
which Congress entangled itself, the very necessity of 
things seemed to press toward the ends which Sumner 
and those who thought like him had advocated from the 
beginning. 

At last, Mr. Sumner saw the fondest dreams of his life 
soon realized. Slavery was forever blotted out in this Re- 
public by the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. By 
the 14th the emancipated slaves were secured in their 
rights of citizenship before the law, and the 15th guar- 
anteed to thetn the right to vote. 

It was, indeed, a most astonishing, a marvellous consinn- 
mation. What ten years before not even the most sanguine 
would have ventured to anticijjate, what only the profound 
faith of the devotee could believe possible, was done. And 
no man had a better right than Charles Sumner to claim for 
himself a pre-eminent share in that great consummation. 
lie had, indeed, not been the originator of most of the 
practical measures of legislation by which such results 
were reached. He had even combated some of them as 
in conflict with his theories. He did not possess the pecu- 
liar ability of constructing policies in detail, of taking- 
account of existing circumstances and advantage of oppoi- 



EULOGY BY CAEL SCIIUTIZ. 129 

tiinities. But he had resolutely marched ahead of public 
oi)inion iu marking the ends to be reached. Nobody had 
done more to inspire and strengthen the moral sjjirit of 
the anti-slavci-y cause. He stood foremost among the 
propelling, driving forces which pushed on the great work 
with undaunted courage, untiring effort, irresistible energy 
and religious devotion. No man's singleness of purjjose, 
fidelity and faith surpassed his, and when by future gen- 
erations the names are called which are inseparably united 
with the deliverance of the American Republic from sla- 
ver}', no name will be called before his own. 

Wliile the championship of human rights is his fii'st 
title to fame, I shonld be unjust to his merit, did I omit to 
mention the services he rendered on another field of 
action, ^lien, in 1861, the secession of the Southern 
States left the anti-slavery party in the majority in the 
Senate of the United States, Charles Sumner was placed 
as chairman at the head of the Conunittee on Foreign 
Relations. It was a high distinction, and no selection 
could have been more fortunate. Withoiit belittling others, 
it may be said that of the many able men then and since 
in the Senate, Mr. Sumner was by far the fittest for that 
responsible position. He had ever since his college days 
made international law a special and fiivorite study, and 
was perfectly familiar with its principles, the history of 
its development, and its literature. Nothing of impor- 
tance had ever been published on that subject in any 
language that had escaped his attention. His knowledge 
of history was luicommonly extensive and accurate ; all 
the leading international law cases, with their incidents 
in detail, their theories and settlements, he had at his 



loO MEMOHIAL OF CIIAKLES SUJrN^ER. 

fiiigcifs" vm\f< ; ami to his last clay liu rciiuiiued indclati- 
gable in iaiquiry. Moreover, he had seen the "world ; lie 
had studied the institutions and polieies of foreign coun- 
tries, on their own soil, aidetl by his personal intereourse 
■with luany of their leading- statesmen, not a few of whom 
remained in friendly correspondenee Avith him ever since 
tlu'ir lii-st acquaintance. 

No public man had a higher appreciation of the posi- 
tion, dignity, and interests of his own country, and no one 
Avas less liable than he to be carried away or driveri to 
hasty and ill-considered steps, by excited popular clamor. 
He was ever strenuous in asserting our own rights, Avhile 
his sense of justice did ntit permit him to be regardless of 
the rights of other nations. His abhorrence of the bar- 
barities of war, and his ardent love of peace, led him 
earnestly to seek for every international diflerence a 
peaceable solution ; and where no settlement could be 
reached by the direct negotiations of diplomacy, the idea 
of arbitration was always uppermost in his mind. He de- 
sired to raise the Republic to the high office of a missionary 
of peace and civilization in the world. He was, therefore, 
not only an unconnnouly well-informed, enlightened and 
experienced, but also an eminently conservative, cautious 
and safe counsellor ; and the few instances in Avhich he 
appeared more impulsive than prudent will, upon candid 
investigation, not mipugn this statement. I am far from 
claiming for him absolute correctness of view, and infalli- 
bility of judgment in every case ; but taking his whole 
career together, it may well be doubted, whether hi the 
whole history of the Eepublic, llu' Senate of the United 
States ever possessed a chairman of the Committee ou 



EULOGY BY CARL SCHURZ. 131 

Foreign Relations who united in himself, in sneh com- 
pleteness, the qualifications necessary and desirable for 
the important and delicate duties of that position. This 
may soimd like the extravagant praise of a personal 
friend ; but it is the sober opinion of men most competent 
to judge, that it does not go beyond his merits. 

lli-s qualities were soon put to the test. Early in the 
war one of the gallant captains of our navy arrested the 
British mail steamer Trent, running from one neutral port 
to anothei-, on the high seas, and took from her by force 
Mason and Slidell, two emissaries of the Confederate Gov- 
ernment, and their despatches. The jieople of the North 
loudly applauded the act. The Seci'etary of the !N^avy ap- 
proved it. The House of Representatives commended it 
in resolutions. Even in the Senate a majority seemed 
inclined to stand by it. The British Government, in a 
threatening tone, demanded the instant restitution of the 
prisoners, and an apology. The people of the North re- 
sponded with a shout of indignation at British insolence. 
The excitement seemed irre^^ressible. Those in quest of 
popularity saw a chance to win it easily by bellicose 
declamation. 

But among those who felt the weight of responsibility 
more moderate counsels prevailed. The Government 
Avisely resolved to surrender the prisoners, and peace with 
Great Britain was preserved. 

It was Mr. Sumner who threw himself into the breach 
against the violent drift of public opinion. In a speech 
in the Senate, no less remarkable for patriotic spirit than 
legal learning and ingenious and irresistible argument, he 
justified the surrender of the prisoners, not on the ground 



132 MEMOKIAT> OF f'TIARLES SLTMNER. 

that during our struggle with the Rebellion we were not 
in :i condition to go to war with Gi'cat Bi'itain, but on the 
higher gi'ound that the surrender, demanded by Great 
Britain in violation of her own traditional pretensions as 
to the rights of belligerents, was in perfect accord with 
American precedent, and the advanced pi-inciples of our 
government concei'uing the rights of neutrals, and that 
this very act, therefore, would for all time constitute an ad- 
ditional and most conspicuous ])recedent to aid in the estab- 
lishment of more humane rules for the protection of the 
rights of neutrals and the mitigation of the injustice and 
baibarity attending maritime war. 

The success of this argument was complete. It turned 
the tide of public opinion. It convinced the American 
l)eople that this was not an act of pusillanimity, but of 
justice; not a humiliation of the Repidilic, but a noble 
vindication of her time-honored principles, and a service 
rendered to the cause of progress. 

Other complications followed. The interference of 
European powers in Mexico came. Excited demands for 
intervention on our part were made in the Senate, and Mr. 
Sunniei', trusting that the victory of the Union over the 
Rebellion would bring on the deliverance of Mexico in its 
train, with signal moderation and tact prevented the 
agitation of so dangerous a policy. It is needless to 
mention the many subsequent instances in which his 
wisdom and skill rendered the Republic sunilar service. 

Only one of his acts provoked comment in foreign 
countries calculated to impair the high esteem ui which 
his name was universally held there. It was his sjieech 
on the Alabama case, preceding the rejection by the 



EULOGY BY CARL SCIIURZ. 133 

Senate of the Clarcndou-Johnson treaty. He was 
accused of having yielded to a viilgar mipulse of dema- 
gogism in flattermg and exciting, by unfair statements 
and extravagant demands, tlie grudge the American 
people might bear to England. IvTo accusation could 
possibly be more unjust, and I know whereof I speak. 
Mr. Sumner loved England — had loved her as long as he 
lived — from a feeling of consanguinity, for the treasures 
of literature she had given to the world, for the services 
she had rendered to hiunan freedom, for the blows she 
had struck at slavery, for the sturdy work she had done 
for the cause of progress and civilization, for the many 
dear friends he had among her citizens. Such Avas his 
impulse, and no man was more mcapable of pandering to 
a vulgar prejudice. 

I will not deny that as to our differences with Great 
Britain he was not entirely free from personal feeling. 
That the England he loved so well — the England of 
Clarkson and Wilberforce, of Cobden and Bright; the 
England to whom he had looked as the champion of the 
anti-slavery cause in the world — should make such hot 
haste to recognize, nay, as he termed it, to set up, on the 
seas, as a belligerent, that Rebellion, whose avowed object 
it was to found an empire of slavery, and to aid that 
Kebellion by every means short of open war against the 
Union, — that was a shock to his feelings which he felt like 
a betrayal of friendship. And yet while that feeling 
appeared in the warmth of his language, it did not dictate 
his policy. I will not discuss here the correctness of his 
opinions as to what he styled the jjrecipitate and unjusti- 
fiable recognition of Southern belligerency, or his theory 



134 MKMOIUAI. OF niAKLKS SUSrSTER. 

of consequential damages. Wliat ho desired to aeeom- 
plish was, not to extort from England a large sum of 
money, but to put our grievance in the strongest light; to 
convince England of the great wrong she had inflicted 
upon us, and thus to prepare a composition, which, 
consisting more in the settlement of great princi2)les and 
rules of international law to govern the future intercoui'sc 
of nations, than in the payment of large damages, Avould 
remove all questions of diti'erence, and serve to restore 
and confirm a friendship which ought never to have been 
interrupted. 

When, finally, the Treaty of Washington was negotiated 
by the Joint High Commission, Mr. Sumner, ahhough 
thinking that more might have been accomplished, did 
not only not oppose that treaty, but actively aided in 
securing for it the consent of the Senate. J^othing would 
have been more jjainful to him than a contiiuuince of 
uafi-iendly relations with Great Britain. Had there been 
danger of war, no man's voice would have j^leaded with 
UKjre fervor to avert such a calamity. He gave ample proof 
that he did not desire any personal opinions to stand in 
the way of a settlement, and if that settlement, which he 
Avillingly supported, did not in every i-esjject satisfy him, 
it was because he dcsii'ed to put the future relations of 
the two countries upon a still safer and more enduring 
basis. 

No statesman ever took part in the direction of our 
foreign affairs who so completely identified himself with 
the most advanced, humane and progressive principles. 
Ever jealous of the honor of his country, he sought to 
elevate that honor by a policy scrupidously just to the 



EULOGY BY CARL SCHURZ. 135 

sti'ong, and generous to the weak. A profound lover of 
peace, he faithfully advocated arbitration as a substitute 
for war. The barbarities of war he constantly labored to 
mitigate. In the hottest days of our civil conflict he pro- 
tested against the issue of letters of marque and reprisal; 
he never lost an opportunity to condemn privateering as 
a barbarous practice, and he even went so far as to desig- 
nate the system of prize-money as inconsistent with our 
enlightened civilization. In some respects, his principles 
were in advance of our time; but surely the day will 
come when this Republic, marching in the front of prog- 
ress, will adopt them as her own, and remembei' theii- 
champion wilh pride. 

I now approach the last period of his life, which brought 
to him new and bitter struggles. 

The work of reconstruction completed, he felt that three 
objects still demanded new eftbrts. One was that the col- 
ored race should be protected by national legislation 
against degrading discrimination, in the enjoyment of fa- 
cilities of education, travel and pleasure, such as stand 
under the control of law; and this object he embodied in 
his civil-rights bill, of which he was the mover and especial 
champion. The second was, that generous reconciliation 
should wipe out the lingering animosities of past conflicts 
and i-eunite in new bonds of brotherhood all those who had 
been divided. And the third was, that the government 
should be restored to the purity and high tone of its ear- 
lier days, and that from its new birth the republic should 
issue with a new lustre of moral greatness, to lead its chil- 
dren to a higher perfection of manhood, and to be a shin- 
ing example and beacon-light to all the nations of the earth. 



l.')G MEMORIAL OF CHARLES SUMNEIt. 

This accomplished, he often said to his friends he would 
be content to lie down and die; but death overtook him 
before he was thus content, and before death came he was 
destined to taste more of the bitterness of life. 

His civil-rights bill he pi'essed with unflagg-ing pei'sever- 
ance, against an ojiposition which stood upon the ground 
that the objects his measure contemplated, belonged, under 
the Constitution, to the jurisdiction of the States; that the 
colored people, armed with the ballot, possessed the neces- 
sary means to provide for their own security, and that the 
^progressive development of public sentiment would afford 
to them gi'cater protection than could be given by national 
legislation of questionable constitutionality. 

The pursuit of the other objects brought upon him ex- 
periences of a painful nature. I have to speak of his dis- 
agreement with the administration of President Grant and 
with his party. iN'othing could be farther from my desire 
than to reoi^en, on a solemn occasion like this, those bitter 
conflicts which are still so fresh in our minds, and to assail 
any living man in the name of the dead. Were it my i)ur- 
pose to attack, I should do so in my own name and choose 
the place where I can be answered, — not this. But I 
have a duty to perform; it is to set forth in the light 
of truth the motives of the dead before the living. I 
knew Charles Sumner's motives well. We stood to- 
gether shoulder to shoulder in many a hard contest. We 
were friends, and between us passed those confidences 
which only intimate friendship knows. Therefore I can 
ti-uly say that I knew his motives well. 

The civil war had greatly changed the conntiy, and left 
many problems behind it, requiring again that building, 



EULOGY BY CARL SCHURZ. 137 

organizing, constructive kind of statesmanship which I 
described as presiding over the Republic in its earlier his- 
tory. For a sohition of many of those problems Mr. 
Sumner's mind was iittle fitted, and ho naturally turned to 
those which appealed to his moral nature. No great civil 
war has ever passed over any countiy, especially a repub- 
lic, without producing wide-spread and dangerous demoral- 
ization and corruption, not only in the government, but 
among the people. In such times the sordid instincts of 
human nature develop themselves to unusual recklessness 
under the guise of patriotism. The ascendancy of no 
political i)arty in a republic has ever been long maintained 
without tempting many of its members to avail themselves 
for their selfish advantage of the opportunities of power 
and party protection, and without attracting a horde of 
camp followers, professing principle, but meaning spoil. It 
has always been so, and the American Republic has not 
escaped the experience. 

Neither Mr. Sumner nor many others could in our cir- 
cumstances close their eyes to this fact. He recognized 
the danger early, and alread}", in ISG-t, he introduced in the 
Senate a bill for the reform of the civil service, crude in 
its detail, but embodying cori-ect principles. Thus he may 
be said to have been the earliest pioneer of the Civil Ser- 
vice Reform movement. 

The evil grew under President Johnson's administra- 
tion, and ever since it has been cropping out, not only 
drawn to light by the efforts of the opposition, but volun- 
tarily and involuntarily, by members of the ruling party 
itself. There were in it many men who confessed to them- 
selves the urgent necessity of meeting the growing danger. 



138 MEMORIAL OF CIIAKLES SUMNER. 

Ml-. Sumner could not be tsilent. He cherished in his 
mind a high ideal of" what this Republic and its gov- 
ernment should be: a government composed of the 
best and wisest of the land; animated by none but the 
highest and most patriotic aspirations; yielding to no self- 
ish impulse; noble in its tone and character; setting- its 
face sternly against all wrong and injustice; presenting- in 
its whole being to the American people a shining- example 
of purity and lofty public s})irit. Mr. Sumner was i)roud 
of his country; there was no prouder Amei'ican in the 
land. He felt in himself the whole dignity of the Ke- 
public. And when he saw anything- that lowered the dig- 
nity of the Kepublic and the character of its govei-nment, 
he felt it as he would have felt a personal offence. He 
criticised it, he denounced it, he remonstrated against it, 
for he could not do otherwise. He did so, frequently and 
without hesitation and reserve, w^hen Mr. Lincoln was 
President. He continued to do so ever since, the more 
loudly, the more difficult it was to make himself heard. It 
was his natui-c ; he felt it to be his right as a citizen ; he 
esteemed it his duty as a Senator. 

That, and no othei, was the motive which impelled him. 
The rupture with the administration was brought on by 
his opposition to the Santo Domingo Treaty. In the rea- 
sons upon which that opposition was based, I know that 
personal feeling had no share. They were patriotic rea- 
sons, publicly and candidly expressed, and it seems they 
were appreciated by a very large portion of the American 
people. It has been said that he provoked the resentment 
of the President by first promising- to support that treat}- 
and then opposing it, thus rendering himself guilty of an 



EULOGY BY CARL SCIIURZ. 139 

act of duplicity. He has publicly denied the justice of 
the charge and stated the facts as they stood in his memo- 
ry. I am willing to make the fullest allowance for the 
jjossibility of a misapprehension of words. But I affirm, 
also, that no living man who knew Mr. Sumner well, will 
hesitate a moment to pronounce the charge of duplicity 
as founded on the most radical of misapprehensions. An 
act of duplicity on his part was simjily a moral impossibil- 
ity. It was absolutely foreign to his nature. Whatever 
may have been the defects of his character, he never 
knowingly deceived a human being. There was in him 
not the faintest shadow of dissimulation, disguise or 
trickery. N^ot one of his words ever had the pui'pose of 
a double meaning, not one of his acts a hidden aim. His 
likes and dislikes, his approval and disapproval, as soon as 
they were clear to his own consciousness, appeared before 
the world in the open light of noonday. His frankness 
was so unbounded, his candor so entire, his ingenuousness 
so childlike, that he lacked even the discretion of ordinary 
prudence. He was almost incapable of moderating his 
feelings, of toning down his meaning in the expression. 
When he might have gained a point by indirection, he 
would not have done so, because he could not. He was 
one of those who, when they attack, attack always in 
front and in broad daylight. The night surprise and the 
flank march were absolutely foreign to his tactics, because 
they were incompatible with his nature. I have known 
many men in my life, but never owe who was less capable 
of a perfidious act or an artful profession. 

Call him a vain, an impracticable, an imperious man, if 
you will, but American history does not mention the name 



14:0 MEMORIAL OF CIIAKLES SUMKER. 

of one, of whom with greater justice it can be said tliat he 
was a ti'iie man. 

The same candor and purity of motives which prompted 
and characterized his opposition to the Santo Domingo 
scheme, prompted and characterized the attacks upon the 
administration which followed. The charges he made, 
and the arguments witli which he supported them, I feel 
not called iipon to enumerate. Whether and how 
far they were cori-ect or erroneous, just or unjust, 
important or unimportant, the judgment of history will 
determine. May that judgment he just and fair to us 
all. But this I can afSrm to-day, for I know it: Charles 
Sumner never made a charge which he did not himself 
firmly, religiously believe to be true. Neither did he con- 
demn those he attacked for anything he did not firmly, re- 
ligiously believe to be wrong. And while attacking those 
in power for what he considered wrong, he was always 
ready to support them in all he considered right. After 
all he has said of the President, he would to-day, if he 
lived, conscientiously, cordially, joyously aid in sustaining 
the Pi-esident's recent veto on an act of fuiaucial legis- 
lation which threatened to inflict a deep injui-y on the 
character, as well as the true interests of the American 
people. 

But at the time of which I speak, all he said was so 
deeply grounded in his feeling and conscience, that it was 
for him difficult to understand how others could form dif- 
ferent conclusions. When, shortly before the National 
Eepublican Convention of 1872, he had delivered in the 
Senate that fierce philippic for which he has been censured 
so much, he turned to me with the question, whether I did 



EULOGY BY CARL SCHURZ. 141 

not think that the statements and arguments he had 
produced would certainly exercise a decisive influence 
on the action of that convention. I replied that I thought 
it would not. He was greatly astonished, — not as 
if he indulged in the delusion that his personal word 
would have such authoritative weight, but it seemed im- 
possible to him that opinions which in him had risen to 
the full strength of overruling conviction, that a feeling 
of duty which in him had grown so solemn and irresisti- 
ble as to inspire him to any risk and sacrifice, ever so 
jDainful, should fall powerless at the feet of a party which 
so long had followed insj^ii'ations kindred to his own. 
Such was the ingenuousness of his natui'e; such his faith 
in the rectitude of his own cause. The i-esult of his effbrt 
is a matter of history. After the Philadelphia convention, 
and not until then, he resolved to oppose his party, and to 
join a movement which was doomed to defeat. He obeyed 
his sense of right and duty at a terrible sacrifice. 

He had been one of the great chiefs of his party, by many 
regarded as the greatest. He had stood in the Senate as 
a mighty monument of the struggles and victories of the 
anti-slavery cause. He had been a martyr of his earnest- 
ness. By all Republicans he had been looked up to with 
respect, by many with veneration. He had been the 
idol of the people of his State. All this was suddenly 
changed. Already, at the time of his opposition to the 
Santo Domingo scheme, he had been deprived of his place 
at the head of the Senate Committee on Foreign Rela- 
tions, which he had held so long, and with so much honor 
to the republic and to himself But few know how 
sharp a pang it gave to his heart, this removal, which he 



142 MEMORIAL OP CHARLES SUMNER. 

felt as the ■wanton degradation of a faithful servant who 
was conscious of only doing his duty. 

But, when he had pronounced against the candidates of 
his pai'ty, worse experiences were for him in store. Journals 
Avhich for years had been full of his praise now assailed 
him Avith remorseless ridicule and vituperation, questioning 
even his past services and calling him a traitor. Men who 
had been proud of his acquaintance turned away their heads 
when they met him in the street. Foi-mer flatterers ea- 
gerly covered his name with slander. Many of those who 
had been his associates in the struggle for freedom sullenly 
withdi'ew from him their fi-ieudship. Even some men of the 
colored race, for whose elevation he had labored with a 
fidelity and devotion equalled by few and surpassed by 
none, joined in the chorus of denunciation. Oh, how keenly 
he felt it! And, as if the cruel malice of ingratitude and 
the unsparing persecution of infuriated partisanship had 
not been enough, another enemy came iipon him, threaten- 
ing his very life. It was a new attack of that disease 
which, for many years, from time to time, had prostrated 
him with the acutest suft'ering, and which shortly should 
lay him low. It admonished him that every word he 
spoke might be his last. He found himself forced to 
leave the field of a contest in which not only his principles 
of right, but even his good name, earned by so many 
years of faithful effort, was at stake. He possessed no 
longer the elastic spirit of youth, and the prospect of new 
struggles had ceased to charm him. His hair had grown 
gray with years, and he had reached that age when a 
statesman begins to love the thought of reposing his head, 
upon the pilloAV of assured public esteem. Even the sweet 



EULOGY BY CAUL SCIIURZ. 143 

comfort of that sanctiiaiy was denied him, in Avhich the 
voice of Avife and child would have said: Rest here, for 
whatever the Avorld may say, we know that yon are good 
and faithful and noble. Only the friends of his youth, who 
kaew him best, surrounded hun with never-flagging con- 
fidence and love, and those of his companions-in-arms, 
who knew him also, and Avho were true to him as they 
were true to their common cause. Thus he stood in the 
presidential campaign of 1872. 

It is at such a moment of bitter ordeal that an honest 
public man feels the impulse of retiring within himself ; 
to examine with scrupulous care the quality of his own 
motives ; anxiously to inquire whether he is really right 
in his opinions and objects when so many old friends say 
that he is wrong ; and then, after such a review at the 
hand of conscience and duty, to form anew his conclu- 
sions without bias, and to proclaim them without fear. 
This he did. 

He had desired, and as he wrote, " he had confidently 
hoped, on returning home from Washington, to meet his 
fellow-citizens in Faneuil Hall, that venerable forum, and 
to speak once more on great questions involving the wel- 
fare of the country, but recurring symptoms of a painful 
character Avarned him against such an attempt." The 
speech he had intended to pronounce, but could not, he 
left in a written form for publication, and AA^ent to Europe, 
seeking rest, imcertain whether he Avould ever return 
alive. In it he reiterated all the reasons Avhich had forced 
him to oppose the administi'ation and the candidates of 
his party. They Avere unchanged. Then folloAved an 
earnest and pathetic plea for universal peace and recon- 



144 MEMORIAL OF CHARLES SUMNER. 

ciliatioii. He showed how necessary tlie revival of frater- 
nal feeling was, not only for the prosperity and physical 
well-heing, bnt for the moral elevation of the American 
people and for the safety and greatness of the Republic. 
He gave words to his profound sympathy with the South- 
ern States in their misfortunes. Indignantly he declared, 
that "second only to the wide-spiead devastations of war 
were the robberies to which those States had been sub- 
jected, under an administration calling itself Republican, 
and with local governments deriving their animating 
impulse fi-om the party in power; and that the people in 
these communities would have been less than men, if, 
sinking under the intolerable burden, they did not turn 
for help to a new pai-ty, promising honesty and reform." 

He recalled the reiterated expression he had given to his 
sentiments, ever since the breaking out of the war; and 
closed the recital with these words: "Such is the simple 
and harmonious record, showing how from the beginning I 
was devoted to peace, how constantly I longed foi- i-econ- 
ciliation; how, with every measure of equal rights, this 
longing found utterance; how it became an essential part 
of my life; how I discai-ded all idea of vengeance and 
])unishment; how reconstruction was, to my mind, a tran- 
sition pei-iod, and how earnestly I looked forward to the 
day when, after the recognition of equal rights, the Repub- 
lic should again be one in reality as in name. If there are 
any who ever maintained a policy of hate, I never was so 
minded; and now in protesting against any such policy, I 
act only in obedience to the irresistible promptings of my 
soul." 

And well might he si)eak thus. Let the people of the 



EULOGY BY t'AKL SCHUKZ. 145 

South hear what I say. Tliey were wont to see in him 
only the implacable assailant of that peculiar institution, 
which was so closely interwoven with all their traditions 
and habits of life, that they regarded it as the very basis 
of their social and moral existence, as the source of their 
prosperity and greatness; the unsparing enemy of the Re- 
bellion, whose success was to realize the fondest dreams of 
their ambition ; the never-resting advocate of the grant of 
suffrage to the colored people, which the}' thought to be 
designed for their own degradation. Thus they had jjer- 
suaded themselves that Charles Sumner was to them a 
relentless foe. 

They did not know, as others knew, that he whom they 
cursed as their persecutor had a heart beating warmly 
and tenderly for all the human kind ; that the efforts of 
his life were unceasingly devoted to those whom he 
thought most in need of aid ; that in the slave he saw 
only the human soul, with its eternal title to the same 
right and dignity which he himself enjoyed ; that he 
assailed the slavemaster only as the oppressor who denied 
that right ; and that the former oppressor ceasing to be 
such, and being ojipressed himself, could surely count 
upon the fulness of his active sympathy freely given in 
the spu'it of equal justice ; that it was the religion of his 
life to protect the weak and oppressed against the strong, 
no matter who were the weak and oppressed, no matter who 
were the strong. They knew not, that while fiercely 
combating a wrong, there was not in his heart a spark of 
hatred even for the wrong-doer who hated him. They 
knew not how well he deserved the high homage involun- 
tarily paid to him by a cartoon dui'ing the late presiden- 



146 MEMORIAL OF CHARLES SUlVtNFR. 

tial campaign, — a cartoon, designed to be malicious, 
which rei:)resented Cliarles Sumner strewing flowers on 
the gi'ave of Preston Brooks. Tiiey foresaw not, that to 
welcome them hack to the lull hrothei-hood of the Amer- 
ican people, he would expose himself to a blow, wounding 
him as cruelly as that which years ago levelled him to the 
ground in the Senate Chamber. And this new blow he 
received for them. The people of the South ignored this 
long. Now that he is gone, let them never forget it. 

From Europe Mr. Sumner returned late in the fall of 
1872, much strengthened, but far from being well. At 
the opening of the session he reintroduced two measures 
which, as he thought, should complete the record of his 
political life. One w^as his civil-rights bill, which had 
failed in the last Congress, and the other, a resolution 
providing that the names of the battles won over fellow- 
citizens in the Avar of the Rebellion, should be removed 
from the regimental colors of the army, and from the 
army register. It was in substance only a repetition of a 
resolution which he had introduced ten years before, in 
1862, during the war, Avhen the first names of victories 
were put on American battle-fiags. This resolution 
called forth a new storm against him. It was denounced 
as an insult to the heroic soldiers of the Union, and a 
degradation of their victoi-ies and well-earned laurels. It 
was condemned as an unpatriotic act. 

Charles Sumner insult the soldiers who had sjiilled 
their blood in a war for human rights ! Charles Sumner 
degrade victories and depreciate laurels won for the cause 
of universal freedom! How strange an imputation! 

Let the dead man have a hearing. This was his thought: 



EULOGY BY CARL SCHUEZ. 147 

l^o civilized nation, from the republics of antiquity down 
to our days, ever thought it wise or patriotic to preserve in 
conspicuous and durable form the mementos of victories 
won over fellow-citizens in civil war. Why not? Because 
every citizen should feel himself with all others as the child 
of a common country, and not as a defeated foe. All civil- 
ized governments of our days have instinctively followed 
the same dictate of wisdom and patriotism. The Irish- 
man, when fighting for old England at Waterloo, was not 
to behold on the red cross floating above him the name of 
the Boyne. The Scotch Highlander, when standing in 
the trenches of Sebastopol, was not by the colors of his 
regiment to be reminded of Culloden. ISTo French soldier 
at Austerlitz or Solferino had to read upon the tricolor 
any reminiscence of the Vendi^e. ]^o Hungai-ian at 
Sadowa was taunted by any Austrian banner with the sui- 
rendcr of Villages. No German regiment, fi-om Saxony 
or Hanover, charging under the iron hail of Gravelotte, 
was made to remember by words written on a Prussian 
standard that the black eagle had conquered them at 
Koniggratz and Langensalza. Should the son of South 
Carolina, when at some future day defending the Republic 
against some foreign foe, be reminded by an inscription 
on the colors floating over him, that under this flag the 
gun was fired that killed his father at Gettysburg? 
Should this great and enlightened Republic, proud of 
standing in the front of human progress, be less wise, less 
large-hearted, than the ancients Avere two thousand years 
ago, and the kingly goveinments of Europe are to-day? 
Let the battle-flags of the brave volunteers, which they 
brought home from the war with the glorious record of 



148 HIEMOPJAL or CHAELES SUMNER. 

their victoi-ies, be preserved intact as a proud ornament of 
our State-Houses and ai'inories. But let tlie colors of the 
army, under which the sons of all the States are to meet 
and mingle in common patriotism, speak of nothing but 
union, — not a luiion of coufjuerors and conquered, but a 
union which is the mother of all, equally tender to all, 
knowing of nothing but equality, peace and love among 
her children. Do you want conspicuous mementos of your 
victories ? They are wi'itten upon the dusky brow of 
every freeman who was once a slave ; they ai'e written on 
the g-ate-posts of a restored Union; and the most glorious 
of all will be written on the faces of a contented people, 
reunited in common national pride. 

Such were the sentiments which inspired that resolution. 
Such were the sentiments which called forth a storm of 
obloquy. Such were the sentiments for which the Legis- 
lature of Massachusetts passed a solemn resolution of 
censure upon Charles Sumner, — Massachusetts, his own 
Massachusetts, whom he loved so ardently w^ith a filial 
love, — of whom he was so proud, who had honored him 
so much in days gone by, and whom he had so long' and 
so faithfully labored to serve and to honor! Oh, those 
were evil days, that winter; days sad and dark, when he 
sat there in his lonesome chamber, unable to leave it, the 
world moving- arornid him, and in it so nnich that was 
hostile, — and he prostrated by the tormenting disease, 
which had returned with fresh violence, — unable to de- 
fend himself, — and with this bitter arrow in his heart! 
Why was not that resolution held up to scorn and vituper- 
ation as an insult to the brave, and an unpatriotic act — 
why was he not attacked and condemned for it when he 



EULOGY BY CARL SCHURZ. 149 

first offered it, ten years before, and when he was in the 
fulness of manhood and power? Tf not then, why now? 
Why now? I shall never forget the melancholy hours I 
sat with him, seeking- to lift him up with cheering words, 
and he, — his frame for hours racked with excruciating 
pain, and then exhausted with suffering, — gloomily brood- 
ing over the thought that he might die so! 

How thankful I am, how thankful every human soul in 
Massachusetts, how thankful every American must be, that 
he did not die then! — and, indeed, more than once, death 
seemed to be knocking at his door. How thankful that he 
was spared to see the day, when the peojjle by striking de- 
velopments were convinced that those who had acted as he 
did, had after all not been impelled by mere whims of 
vanity, or reckless ambition, or sinister designs, but had 
good and patriotic reasons for what they did; — when the 
heai't of Massachusetts came back to him full of the old 
love and confidence, assuring him that he would again be 
her chosen son for her representative seat in the House of 
States; — when the lawgivers of the old Commonwealth, 
obeying an irresistible impulseof justice, wiped away from 
the records of the Legislature, and from the fair name of 
the State, that resolution of censure which had stung him 
so deeply, — and when retui-ning vigor lifted him up, and 
a new sunburst of hope illumined his life! How thankful 
we all are that he lived that one year longer! 

And yet, have you thought of it, if he had died in those 
dark days, when so many clouds hung over him, — would 
not then the much vilified man have been the same Charles 
Sunnier, whose death but one year later afflicted millions 
of hearts with a pang of bereavement, whose praise is now 



150 MEMORIAL OF CH^VF.LES SOiCvER. 

on every lip for the purity of his Hfe, for his fidehty to 
great iiriuciples, aud for the loftiness of his patriotism? 
Was he not a year ago the same, the same in purpose, 'he 
same in principle, tlie same in character ? What had he 
done then that so many who praise him to-day should 
have then disowned him ? See what he had done. He 
had simply been true to his convictions of duty. He 
had approved and ui'ged what he thought right, he had 
attacked and opposed what he thought wrong. To his 
convictions of duty he had sacrificed political associations 
most dear to him, the security of his position of which he 
was proud. For his convictions of duty he had stood up 
against those more powerful than he: he had exposed 
himself to reproach, obloqu}' and persecution. Had he 
not done so, he would not have been the man yon praise 
to-day ; and yet for doing so he was cried down l)ut yester- 
ilay. He had lived up to the great word he spoke when 
he entered the Senate : " The slave of principle, I call no 
party master." That declaration was greeted with ap- 
plause, and when, true to his word, he refused to call a 
party master, the act was covered with reproach. 

The spirit impelling him to do so w"as the same con- 
science which urged him to break awa^' from the powerful 
party which controlled his State in the days of Daniel 
"Webster, and to join a leeble minority, which stood up 
for freedom ; to throw away the fovor and defy the power 
of the wealthy and refined, in order to plead the cause of 
the down-trodden and degraded; to stand up against the 
slave pow'er in Congress with a courage never surpassed; 
to attack the prejudice of birth and religion, and to plead 
fearlessly for the rights of the foreigu-boru citizen at a 



EULOGY BY CAKL SCHUEZ. 151 

time when the know-nothiiio" movement was controllino- 
his State and might have defeated his own re-election to 
the Senate; to advocate emancipation when others trem- 
bled with fear; to march ahead of his followers, when they 
were afraid to follow; to rise np alone for what he thought 
right, when others would not rise with him. It was that 
brave spirit which does ever\'thing, defies everj'thing, risks 
evei-ything, sacrifices everything, comfort, society, party, 
popular support, station of honor, prospects, for sense of 
right and conviction of duty. That is it for which you 
honored him long-, for which yon reproached him yester- 
day, and for whicli yon honor him again to-day, and will 
honor him forever. 

Ah, what a lesson is this for the American people, — a 
lesson learned so often, and, alas! forgotten almost as 
often as it is learned! Is it well to discourage, to pro- 
scribe in 3^onr public men that independent spirit which 
will boldl}" assert a conscientious sense of duty, even 
against the behests of power or party? Is it well to teach 
them that they must serve the command and interest of 
pai-ty, even at the price of conscience, or they must be 
crushed under its heel, whatever their past service, what- 
ever their ability, whatever their character may be? Is it 
well to make them believe that he who dares to be him- 
self must be hnnted as a political outhiw, who will find 
justice only when he is dead? That would have been the 
sad moral of his death, had Charles Sumner died a year 
ago. 

Let the American jieople never forget that it has ahvays 
been the independent spirit, the all-defying sense of duty 
which broke the way for every great progressive move- 



152 ]>rEMORIAL OF CHARLES SUMNER. 

ment since mankind has a, history; which g'ave the Ameri- 
can colonies their sovereignty and made this great 
Republic; which defied the power of slavery, and made 
this a Republic of freemen; and which — who knows, — 
may again be needed some day to defy the power of igno- 
rance, to arrest the inroads of cori-nption, or to break the 
subtle tyranny of organization in oi-der to preserve this 
as a Republic! And therefore let no man understand me 
as offering what I have said about Mr. Sumner's course, 
during the last period of his Hfe, as an apology for what 
he did. He was right before his own conscience, and 
needs no apology. Woe to the Republic when it looks in 
vain for the men who seek the truth without prejudice 
and speak the truth without fear, as they understand it, 
no matter whether the world be wilUng to listen or not! 
Alas for the generation tiiat would put such men into 
their graves with the poor boon of an apology for what 
\vas in them noblest and best! Who will not agree that, 
had power or partisan spirit, which persecuted him because 
lie followed higher aims than party interest, ever suc- 
ceeded in subjugating and moulding him after its fashion, 
against his conscience, against his conviction of duty, 
against his sense of right, he would have sunk into his grave 
a miserable ruin of his great self, wrecked in his moral na- 
ture, deserving only a tear of pity? For he was great and 
useful only because he dared to be himself all the days 
of his life; and for this you have, when he died, put the 
laurel u[)on his brow! 

From the coffin which hides his body, Charles Sum- 
ner now rises up before our eyes an historic character. 
Let us look at him once more. His life lies before us 



EULOGY BY CARL SCHURZ. 153 

like an open book which contains no double meanings, no 
crooked passages, no rajstei'ies, no concealments. It is 
clear as crystal. 

Even his warmest friend will not see in it the model of 
perfect statesmanship; not that eagle glance which, from 
a lofty eminence, at one sweep surveys the whole field on 
which by labor, thought, strife, accommodation, impulse, 
restraint, slow and rapid movement, the destinies of a na- 
tion are worked out, — and which, while surveying the 
whole, yet observes and penetrates the fitness and working 
of every detail of the great machinery; — not that ever 
calm and steady and self-controUing good sense, which 
judges existing things just as. they are, and existing forces 
just as to what they can accomplish, and while instruct- 
ing, conciliating, persuading and moulding those forces, 
and guiding them on toward an ideal end, correctly esti- 
mates comparative good and comparative evil, and impels 
or restrains as that estimate may command. That is the 
true genius of statesmanship, fitting all times, all circum- 
stances, and all great objects to be reached by political 
action. 

Mr. Sumner's natural abilities were not of the very first 
order; but they were sup2)lemented by acquired abilities of 
most remarkable power. His mind was not apt to invent 
and create by inspiration ; it produced by study and work. 
Neither had his mind superior constructive capacity. 
When he desired to originate a measui-e of legislation, he 
scarcely ever elaborated its practical detail; he usually 
threw his idea into the form of a resolution, or a bill 
giving in the main his purpose only, and then he advanced 
to the discussion of the principles involved. It was 



154 MEMORIAL OF CHARLES SUMNER. 

difficult for him to look at a question or problem from 
more than one point of view, and to compi'ehend its 
different bearings, its complex relations with other ques- 
tions or problems; and to that one point of view he was 
apt to subject all other cousiderations. He not only 
thought, but he did not hesitate to say that all construction 
of the Constitution must be subservient to the supreme 
duty of giviug the amplest protection to the natural rights 
of man by direct national legislation. He was not 
free from that dangerous tendency to forget the limits 
which bound the legitimate range of legislative and 
goveiiimental action. On economical questions his 
vieAvs were enlightened and thoroughly consistent. 
He had studied such subjects more than is commonly 
su})posed. It was one of his last regrets that his health 
did not permit him to make a speech in favor of an early 
resumption of specie payments. On matters of inter- 
national laAv and foreign affairs he was the recognized 
authority of the Senate. 

But some of his very shortcomings served to increase 
that peculiar power which he exerted in his time. His 
public life was thrown into a period of a revolutionary 
charactei', when one great end was the self-imposed sub- 
ject of a univei-sal struggle, a struggle which was not 
made, not maniifactured by the design of men, but had 
grown from the natural conflict of existing things, and 
grev/ irresistibly on and on, until it enveloped all the 
thought of the nation; and that one great end appealing 
more than to the practical sense, to the moral impulses of 
men, making of them the fighting foi'ce. There Mr. 
Sumner found his place and there he gi'ew great, for that 



EULOGY BY CAKL SfiHUKZ. 155 

moral impulse was stronger in him than in most of the 
world around him; and it was in him not a mere crude, 
untutoi-ed force of nature, but educated and elevated by 
thought and study; and it found in his brain and heart an 
armory of strong weapons given to but few: vast infor- 
mation, legal learning, industry, eloquence, undaunted 
courage, an independent and iron will, profound convic- 
tions, unbounded devotion and sublime faith. It found 
there also a keen and just instinct as to the objects which 
must be reached and the forces which must be set in 
motion and driven on to reach them. Thus keeping the 
end steadily, obstinately, intensely in view, he mai'ched 
ahead of his followers, never distui'bed by their anxieties 
and fears, showing them that what was necessary was 
possible, and forcing tliem to follow him, — a gi-eat 
moving power, such as the struggle required. 

Nor can it be said that this impatient, irrepressible pro- 
pulsion was against all prudence and sound judgment, for 
it must not be forgotten, that, when Mr. Sumner stepped 
into the front, the policy of compi-omise was exhausted; 
the time of composition and expedient was past. Things 
had gone so far, that the idea of reaching the end, which 
ultimately must be reached, by mutual concession and a 
gradual and peaceable process, was utterly hopeless. The 
conflicting forces could not be reconciled; the final strug- 
gle was indeed irrepi'essible and inevitable, and all that 
could then be done was to gather up all the existing forces 
for one supreme effort, and to take care that the final strug- 
gle should bring forth the necessary results. 

Thus the instinct and the obstinate, concentrated, iiTe- 
sistible moving power which Mr. Sumner possessed were 



156 MEMORIAL OF CHARLES SUIMNER. 

an essential part of the true statesmanship of the I'evolu- 
tionarj period. Had he lived befoi'e or after this great 
period, in qniet, ordinary times, he would perhaps never 
liave gone into puldic life, or never risen in it to conspicu- 
ous significance. But all he was by nature, by acquire- 
ment, by ability, by moi-al impulse, made him one of the 
heroes of that great struggle against slavery, and in some 
I'espects the first. And then when the victory was Avon, 
the same moral nature, the same sense of justice, the same 
enlightened mind, impelled him to plead the cause of peace, 
reconciliation and brotherhood, through equal rights and 
even justice, thus completing the fulness of his ideal. On 
the pedestal of his time he stands one of the greatest of 
Americans. 

What a i)eculiar power of fascination there was in him 
as a pul)lic man! It acted much through his eloquence, 
but not through his eloquence alone. His speech was not 
a graceful flow of melodious periods, now di'awing on the 
listener with the persuasive tone of confidential conver- 
sation, then carrying him along with a more rapid rush of 
thought and language, and at last lifting him up with the 
peals of reason in passion. His arguments marched forth 
at once in grave and stately array; his sentences like rows 
of massive doric columns, unrelieved by ]deasing variety, 
severe and imposing. His orations, especially those pro- 
nounced in the Senate before the war, contain many 
passages of grandest beauty. There was nothing kmdly 
persuasive in his utterance; his reasoning appeared in the 
form of consecutive assertion, not seldom strictly logical 
and irresistiljly strong. His mighty appeals were always 
addressed to the noblest instincts of human nature. His 



EULOGY BY CAKL SOHUKZ. 157 

speech was never enlivened by anything like wit or 
hnmor. They were foreign to his natnre. He has never 
been guilty of a Hash of irony or sarcasm. His weapon 
was not the foil, but the battle-axe. 

He has often been accused of being uncharitable to 
oi)ponents in debate, and of wonnding their feelings with 
uncalled for hai'shness of language. He was guilty of 
that, but no man was less conscious of the stinging force 
of his language than he. He was ofteu sorry for the 
eifect his thrusts had produced, but being always so firmly 
and honestly persuaded of the correctness of his own 
ojiinions, that he could scarcely ever appreciate the position 
of an opponent, he fell into the same fault again. Not 
seldom he ajjpeared haughty in his assumptions of 
anthority; but it was the imperiousness of profound con- 
viction, which, wliile sometimes exasi^erating his hearers, 
yet scarcely ever failed to exercise over them a certain 
sway. His fancy was not fertile, his figures mostly labored 
and stiif. In his later years his vast learning began to 
become an encumbering- burden to his eloquence. The 
mass of quoted sayings and historical illustrations, not 
seldom accumulated beyond measure and grotesquely 
grouped, sometimes threatened to sufibcate the original 
thought and to oppress the hearer. But even then 
his words scarcely ever failed to chain the atten- 
tion of the audience, and I have more than once 
seen the Senate attentively listening while he read 
fi-om printed slips the most elaborate disquisition, 
which, if attempted by any one of his colleagues, 
would at once have emptied the floor and galleries. But 
there were always moments recalling to our mind the 



158 MEMORIAL OF CHARLES SUMNER. 

days of his freshest vigor, when he stood in the midst of 
the great struggle, lilting up the youth of the country 
with heai-t-stirriug appeals, and with the lion-like thunder 
of his voice shaking the Senate chamber. 

Still there was another source from which that fascina- 
tion sprung. Behind all he said and did there stood a 
grand manhood, wliich never lailed to make itself felt. 
AYhat a figure he was, with his tall and stalwart frame, 
his manly face, topi^ed with his shaggy locks, his noble 
bearing, the finest type of American Senatorship, the 
tallest oak of the forest! And how small they a})})earcd 
by his side, the common run of politicians, who spend their 
days with the laying of pipe, and the setting up of pins, 
and the pulling of wires; who barter an office to secure 
this vote, and procure a contract to get that; Avho stand 
always with their ears to the wind to hear how the 
administration sneezes, and what their constituents whis- 
per, in mortal trepidation lest they fail in being all things 
to evei-ybody! How he towered above them, he whose 
aims wei'c always the highest and noblest ; whose very 
presence made you forget the vulgarities of political 
life; who dared to difter with any man ever so powerful, 
any multitude ever so numerons; who regarded party 
as nothing but a means for gi-eat ends, and for those 
ends defied its power; to whom the arts of demagogism 
were so contemptible, that he would rather have sunk 
into obscurity and oblivion than descend to them; to 
whom the dignity of his office was so sacred that he 
woidd not even ask for it for fear of darkening its lustre! 

Honor to the people of Massachusetts who, for twenty- 
three years, kept in the Senate, and would have kept him 



EULOGY BY CAKL SCIIURZ. 159 

there ever so long, had he Uved, a man who never, even 
to them, conceded a shigle iota of his convictions in order 
to remain there! And what a Hfe was his! A hfe so 
wholly devoted to what was good and pure! There he 
stood in the midst of the grasping materialism of our 
times, around him the eager chase for the almighty dollar, 
no thought of opportunity ever entering the smallest 
corner of his mind, and disturbing his high endeavors; 
with a virtue which the possession of power could not 
even tempt, much less debauch; fi'om whose presence the 
very thought of corruption instinctively shrunk back ; a 
life so spotless, an integrity so intact, a character so 
high, that the most daring eagerness of calumny, the 
most wanton audacity of insinuation, standing on tiptoe, 
could not touch the soles of his shoes! 

They say that he indulged in overweening self-appre- 
ciation. Ay, he did have a magnificent pride, a lofty 
self-esteem. Why should he not? Let wretches desjiise 
thcm.selves, for they have good reason to do so; not he. 
But in his self-esteem there was nothing small and mean; 
no man lived to whose very nature envy and petty 
jealousy were more foi'eign. Conscious of his own merit, 
he never depreciated the merit of others; nay, he not only 
recognized it, but he expressed that recognition with that 
cordial spontaneity which can only flow from a sincere 
and generous heart. His pride of self was like his pride 
of country. He was the proudest American; he was the 
proudest J^ew Englandcr; and yet he was the most cos- 
mopolitan American I have ever seen. There was in him 
not the faintest shadow of that narrow prejudice which 
looks askance at what has orown in foreign lands. His 



IGO MEMOKIAL OF CIIAKLES SUMNER. 

generous heart and his enlightened mind were too gener- 
ous and too enliglitened not to give the fnllest measure of 
apjireciation to all that was good and woithy, from what- 
ever quarter of the globe it came. 

And now his home! There are those around mc who 
have breathed the air of his house in Washington, tliat 
atmosphere of refinement, taste, scholarship, art, friendship, 
and warm-hearted hospitality; who have seen those rooms 
covered and filled with his pictures, his engravings, his 
statues, his bronzes, his books and rare manuscripts — the 
collecticms of a lifetime — the image of the richness of 
his mind, the comfort and consolation of his solitude. 
They have beheld his chiidiike smile of satisfaction when 
he unlocked the most precious of his treasures and told 
their stories. 

They remember the conversations at his hospitable 
board, genially inspired and directed by him, on art and 
books and inventions and great times and great men, — 
when suddenly sometimes, by accident, a new mine of cu- 
rious knowledge disclosed itself in him, which his friends 
had never known he possessed ; or when a siinburst of the 
affectionate gentleness of his soul warmed all lioarts 
around him. They remember his craving for friendship, 
as it si)oke through the far outstretched hand when you 
arrived, and the glad exclamation: "I am so happy you 
came," — and the beseeching, almost despondent tone 
when you departed : "Do not leave me yet; do stay a 
while longer, I want so much to speak with you ! " — It 
is all gone now. He could not stay himself, and he has 
left his friends behind, feeling more deeply than ever that 
no man could know him well but to love him. 



EULOGY BY CAUL SCHUEZ, 161 

Now we have laid him into his grave, in the motherly soil 
of Massachusetts, which was so dear to him. He is at rest 
now, the stalwart, brave old champion, whose face and 
bearing were so austere, and whose heart was so full of 
tenderness ; who began his career with a jjathetic plea for 
universal peace and charity, and whose whole life was 
an arduous, incessant, never-resting struggle, which left 
him all covered with scars. And we can do nothing 
for him but commemorate his lofty ideals of Liberty, and 
Equality, and Justice, and Reconciliation, and Purity, 
and the earnestness and courage and touching fidelity 
with which he fought for them ; so genuine in his sin- 
cerity, so single-minded in his zeal, so heroic in his de- 
votion ! 

Oh, that we could but for one short hour call him up 
from his coffin, to let him see with the same eyes which 
saw so much hostility, that those who stood against him 
in the struggles of his life are his enemies no longer! 
That we could show him the fruit of the conflicts and suffer- 
ings of his last three years, and that he had not struggled 
and suflered in vain ! We would bring before him, not only 
those who from offended partisan zeal assailed him, and 
who now with sorrowful hearts praise the purity of his 
patriotism; but we would bring to him that man of 
the South, a slaveholder and a leader of secession in 
his time, the echo of whose words spoken in the name 
of the South in the halls of the IN^ational Capitol we heard 
but yesterday ; words of respect, of gratitude, of 
tenderness. That man of the South should then do 
what he deplored not to have done while he lived, — 
he should lay his hand upon the shoulders of the old friend 



162 ME3IOKIAL OP CHARLES SUMNER. 

of the human kind and say to hhii: " Is it you whom I 
hated, and Avho, as I thought, hated me? I have learned 
now the greatness and magnanimity of your soul, and 
here I offer you my hand and heart." 

Could he hut see this with those eyes, so weary of con- 
tention and strife, how contentedly would he close them 
ag-ain, having- heheld the greatness of his victcn-ies! 

People of Massachusetts! he was the son of your soil, in 
Avhich he now sleeps ; Init he is not all your own. He helongs 
to all of US in the North and in the South,— to the hlacks he 
helped to make free, and to the whites he strove to make 
brothers again. On the grave of him whom so many 
thought to be their enemy, and found to be their friend, 
let the hands be clasped which so bitterly warred against 
each other. Upon that grave let the youth of America 
be taught, by the stoiy of his life, that not only genius, 
power and success, but more than these, patriotic devotion 
and virtue, make the greatness of the citizen ! If this lesson 
be understood and followed, more than Chai'Ies Sumner's 
living- word could have done for the gloi-y of America will 
then be done by the inspiration of his great example. And 
itAvill truly be said, that although his body lies mouldering 
in the earth, yet in the assured rights of all, in the brother- 
hood of a reunited people, and in a purified Republic, he 
still lives and will live forever. 



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